Search for: All records

Competencies are knowledge, skills, and dispositions that enable professionals to successfully perform a goal-oriented task. A traditional education model focuses primarily on presenting and assessing knowledge, with student performance represented by grades. The Competency-Based Education (CBE) model focuses on each student developing and demonstrating knowledge, skills, and dispositions. This implies a difference in the approach towards curriculum (content), pedagogy (teaching methods), and assessment. This workshop will introduce basic concepts of competencies and CBE. We will present a competency list derived from research on computing professionals' experiences. Participants will develop a spiral curriculum and (re)design a course to purposefully integrate cross-disciplinary skills (e.g., communication) and dispositions (e.g., perseverance), along with computing skills. Takeaways will include: (1) an understanding of what competencies and CBE are, and what pedagogical and assessment approaches may align with CBE; (2) a document that integrates competencies across a spiral curriculum; and (3) a plan for (re)designing one of their courses. Collaborative ideation will be used to help generate ideas for each participant's unique context and goals. Higher education faculty/instructors and administrators who would like to learn more about competencies and apply CBE practices to their own program/course will find the most benefit from this workshop. Multiple people from the same program are encouraged to attend, allowing them to consider how they can plan for integrating competencies across their program-level curriculum. Please bring internet-enabled laptops/comparably sized devices, choose a course to (re)design, and have access to relevant course materials. 

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. 

This paper explores Computing and Engineering (C&E) educators' perceptions about dispositions and investigates their readiness to integrate dispositions into their teaching. Dispositions are the underlying beliefs, attitudes, and values that influence how individuals apply their knowledge and skills. Employers recognize the importance of dispositions in the workplace, yet in C&E education the cultivation and assessment of dispositions is not frequently emphasized. Recent guidelines and frameworks in C&E education require dispositional competencies. However, implementing these guidelines requires pedagogical and curricular transformations, including authentic teaching and learning experiences and innovative assessment techniques. This study aims to address an important gap in C&E education by investigating educators' perceptions and readiness for integrating dispositions into curricula, thereby contributing to the ongoing efforts to align educational programs' objectives with industry needs to foster graduates' success in their careers. This work is guided by the Agency Influence Framework, adapted to incorporate educators' worldview (epistemology) in addition to their beliefs, abilities, and motivations towards their readiness for change. The study provides preliminary insights and serves as a foundation for future research in educators' perception about dispositions. 

Vignettes are short stories along with a set of questions that engage the reader to comment on the story. Vignettes have been used in professional academic programs (e.g., teacher preparation and medical education), for professional development in various fields (e.g., teaching ethics in psychology and medicine), and in various research fields for data collection. In this work, vignettes are used to elicit students' understanding of dispositions in computing education. Professional dispositions enable behaviors that are valued in the workplace, such as adaptability or self-directedness. They are often explicitly stated in computing job postings. While the relevance of dispositions is widely recognized in the workplace, only recently have curricular guidelines for computing programs recognized professional dispositions as an integral part of competencies and as complementary to knowledge and skills. There is scarce literature on the use of vignettes in teaching undergraduate computing, or on how best to foster dispositions in students. In this project, four faculty from four diverse institutions in the U.S., along with three consulting experts, have collaborated to design and evaluate the use of vignettes in the classroom. This paper documents researchers' efforts to gain insights into students' perceptions of dispositions through the use of vignettes. Such insights may guide educators to identify pedagogical strategies for fostering dispositions among students. This paper presents an iterative process for vignette design with continuous review by researchers and focus group members. The vignettes in this study use stories of situations which demonstrate the application of a disposition, drawn from various fields and walks of life to represent diverse groups and experiences. Students are presented with the vignette story and asked to identify the disposition illustrated. To elicit students' understanding of dispositions in terms of their personal behaviors, students are asked to describe a situation in which they have experienced the disposition. Lessons learned in the design and use of vignettes are discussed. 

Background and Context. Dispositions are personal qualities including values, beliefs, and attitudes that impact an individual's actions and behaviors. Dispositions help a person identify why and when things need to be done and motivate them to follow through in action using their knowledge and skills. A person may have the appropriate skills and knowledge to perform a task and yet may not be able to perform due to the lack of suitable disposition. Objective. As part of a larger multi-institutional project aimed at improving computing education through a competency-based approach, we plan to create a research-informed competency model that includes knowledge, skills, and dispositions valued by computing professionals in the field. The objective of this paper is to report our findings on dispositions based on the National Research Council (NRC) framework. Method. We collected data from conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) and interviewing computing professionals from the United States. For the SLR, we started with 4949 articles from prominent databases (ERIC, SCOPUS, ACM, IEEE) which were filtered down to 52 research papers using rigorous inclusion-exclusion criteria. For conducting the semi-structured interviews, we used criterion and chain-link sampling to recruit 31 computing professionals, including software developers, network administrators, systems analysts, web developers, engineering managers, and others. Findings. Based on the aggregate findings from the SLR and interviews, in this paper we present the dispositions that are deemed necessary by computing professionals or employers to any computing career. The dispositions were categorized into the themes of Collaborative Orientation, Conscientiousness, Intellectual Openness, Self-Regulation, and Lifelong Learning Orientation. Implications. We discuss the importance of incorporating dispositions in computing curricula, interrelationship between skills and dispositions, and possible pedagogical techniques that can be used to cultivate dispositions. 

Competencies (knowledge, skills, and dispositions) enable employers and educators to speak a common language regarding what computing graduates are expected to demonstrate on the job. This study focuses on competencies required by managers in the computing industry, based on semi-structured interviews of ten individuals in managerial roles, such as directors, project managers, and product managers with prior experience in computing-related roles. Constant Comparative for Naturalistic Inquiry was used to analyze the data. The most frequently discussed managerial skills included leadership, project management, hiring and evaluating candidates, and mentorship. In addition, professional skills such as communication, problem-solving, and lifelong learning were mentioned, along with essential dispositions that support the development of these skills, e.g., collaborative mindset, lifelong learning orientation, and self-regulation. Participants also emphasized the need to make judgments, build relationships, and collaborate within or outside their team. Career readiness in the computing industry is not limited to entry-level jobs; professionals should have the opportunity to navigate their preferred career path—whether they aspire to move down a technical or managerial path. This study can contribute to both students’ and educators’ understanding of the managerial career path and what types of competencies and experiences should be included in computing education programs to set them up for success across their career path. Implications for pedagogical approaches will also be discussed.