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Since the early 21st century, ABET’s accreditation criteria have focused on learning outcomes (what students learn) rather than what professors teach. Such accreditation criteria bring to bear the need for programs to establish clear learning objectives and assessment processes that ensure that program graduates have the requisite technical and professional preparation. To this end, ABET defines student outcomes as “what students are expected to know and be able to do by the time of graduation,” further noting that these outcomes “relate to the knowledge, skills, and behaviors that students acquire as they progress through the program.” With the recent release of Computing Curricula 2020 (CC2020), the competencies of computing program graduates have received additional attention. CC2020 describes competency as “comprising knowledge, skills, and dispositions that are observable in accomplishing a task within a work context.” ABET’s student outcomes thus largely correspond to the CC2020 competencies of program graduates. This paper is a first attempt to reconcile the two notions in the context of computer science. It presents the relevant background and discusses student competencies and their assessments that focus on competency-based learning in computer science. The contributions of this paper are (1) forging an improved shared understanding of computing competencies and (2) an interpretation of ABET’s student outcomes to improve the competency, including dispositions, expectations of computer science graduates.
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A Practical Approach to Assessing IT Professional Skills
The release of the Information Technology (IT) 2017 curricular guidelines provided the impetus to focus on students’ professional competencies by incorporating authentic practice into disciplinary content. Authentic practices require appropriate learning experiences such as workplace-bound experiences, employer engagement with programs via paid internships, and critical reflection on what was learned. Both professional technical and non-technical skills must be emphasized for such authenticity. However, practical assessment of the learning of professional competencies remains challenging. This paper develops such a practical assessment approach to IT competencies. It builds on the industry-led Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) that defines over 120 IT professional skills across seven levels of responsibility and experience. SFIA provides actionable and measurable activities and behaviors, which IT graduates need to demonstrate in the workplace. The paper explores the assessment of student performance on authentic, real-world tasks using a rubric-based scoring scheme supported by a systematic collection of sample student work over their time in the program. It concludes with a discussion of the validation of the proposed approach to demonstrate its practicality.
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- PAR ID:
- 10501930
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The 24th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education (SIGITE ’23)
- ISBN:
- 9798400701306
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 106 to 111
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- IT competencies dispositions skills frameworks SFIA skills framework CC2020
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Marietta GA USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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