Search for: All records

Integrated computing curricula combine learning objectives in computing with those in another discipline, like literacy, math, or science, to give all students experience with computing, typically before they must decide whether to take standalone CS courses. One goal of integrated computing curricula is to provide an accessible path to an introductory computing course by introducing computing concepts and practices in required courses. This study analyzed integrated computing curricula to determine which CS practices and concepts are taught, how extensively the curricula are taught, and, by extension, how they might prepare students for later computing courses. The authors conducted a content analysis to examine primary and lower secondary (i.e., K-8) curricula that are taught in non-CS classrooms, have explicit CS learning objectives (i.e., CS+X), and that took 5+ hours to complete. Lesson plans, descriptions, and resources were scored based on frameworks developed from the K-12 CS Framework, including programming concepts, non-programming CS concepts, and CS practices. The results found that curricula most extensively taught introductory concepts and practices, such as sequences, and rarely taught more advanced content, such as conditionals. Students who engage with most of these curricula would have no experience working with fundamental concepts, like variables, operators, data collection or storage, or abstraction in the context of a program. While this focus might be appropriate for integrated curricula, it has implications for the prior knowledge that students should be expected to have when starting standalone computing courses. 

Integrated computing curricula combine learning objectives in computing with those in another discipline, like literacy, math, or science, to give all students experience with computing, typically before they must decide whether to take standalone CS courses. One goal of integrated computing curricula is to provide an accessible path to an introductory computing course by introducing computing concepts and practices in required courses. This paper analyzed integrated computing curricula to determine which CS practices and concepts they teach and how extensively and, thus, how they prepare students for later computing courses. The authors conducted a content analysis to examine primary and lower secondary (i.e., K-8) curricula that are taught in non-CS classrooms, have explicit CS learning objectives (i.e., CS+X), and that took >5 hours to complete. Lesson plans, descriptions, and resources were scored based on frameworks developed from the K-12 CS Framework, including programming concepts, non-programming CS concepts, and CS practices. The results found that curricula most extensively taught introductory concepts and practices, such as sequences, and rarely taught more advanced content, such as conditionals. Students who engage with most of these curricula would have no experience working with fundamental concepts, like variables, operators, data collection or storage, or abstraction in the context of a program. While this focus might be appropriate for integrated curricula, it has implications for the prior knowledge that students should be expected to have when starting standalone computing courses. 

Across the lifespan, humans are biased to look first at what is easy to see, with a handful of well-documented visual saliences shaping our attention (e.g., Itti & Koch, 2001). These attentional biases may emerge from the contexts in which moment-tomoment attention occurs, where perceivers and their social partners actively shape bottom-up saliences, moving their bodies and objects to make targets of interest more salient. The goal of the present study was to determine the bottom-up saliences present in infant egocentric images and to provide evidence on the role that infants and their mature social partners play in highlighting targets of interest via these saliences. We examined 968 unique scenes in which an object had purposefully been placed in the infant’s egocentric view, drawn from videos created by one-year-old infants wearing a head camera during toy-play with a parent. To understand which saliences mattered in these scenes, we conducted a visual search task, asking participants (n = 156) to find objects in the egocentric images. To connect this to the behaviors of perceivers, we then characterized the saliences of objects placed by infants or parents compared to objects that were otherwise present in the scenes. Our results show that body-centric properties, such as increases in the centering and visual size of the object, as well as decreases in the number of competing objects immediately surrounding it, both predicted faster search time and distinguished placed and unplaced objects. The present results suggest that the bottom-up saliences that can be readily controlled by perceivers and their social partners may most strongly impact our attention. This finding has implications for the functional role of saliences in human vision, their origin, the social structure of perceptual environments, and how the relation between bottom-up and top-down control of attention in these environments may support infant learning. 

Reading and arithmetic are difficult cognitive feats for children to master and youth from low-income communities are often less “school ready” in terms of letter and number recognition skills ( Lee and Burkam, 2002 ). One way to prepare children for school is by encouraging caregivers to engage children in conversations about academically-relevant concepts by using numbers, recognizing shapes, and naming colors ( Levine et al., 2010 ; Fisher et al., 2013 ). Previous research shows that caregiver-child conversations about these topics rarely take place in everyday contexts ( Hassinger-Das et al., 2018 ), but interventions designed to encourage such conversations, like displaying signs in a grocery store, have resulted in significant increases in caregiver-child conversations ( Ridge et al., 2015 ; Hanner et al., 2019 ). We investigated whether a similar brief intervention could change caregiver-child conversations in an everyday context. We observed 212 families in a volunteer-run facility where people who are food-insecure can select food from available donations. Volunteers greet all the clients as they pass through the aisles, offer food, and restock the shelves as needed. About 25% of the clients have children with them and our data consist of observations of the caregiver-child conversations with 2- to 10-year-old children. Half of the observation days consisted of a baseline condition in which the quantity and quality of caregiver-child conversation was observed as the client went through aisles where no signs were displayed, and volunteers merely greeted the clients. The other half of the observation days consisted of a brief intervention where signs were displayed (signs-up condition), where, volunteers greeted the clients and pointed out that there were signs displayed to entertain the children if they were interested. In addition, there was a within-subject manipulation for the intervention condition where each family interacted with two different categories of signs. Half of the signs had academically-relevant content and the other half had non-academically-relevant content. The results demonstrate that the brief intervention used in the signs-up condition increases the quantity of conversation between a caregiver and child. In addition, signs with academically-relevant content increases the quality of the conversation. These findings provide further evidence that brief interventions in an everyday context can change the caregiver-child conversation. Specifically, signs with academically-relevant content may promote school readiness.