Identification and Measurement of Computer Science Competencies in the Area of Software Development, Software Engineering and Programming Kathrin Bröker University of Paderborn Fürstenallee 11 33102 Paderborn, Germany
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
students should get the best education and furthermore we want to have only small drop out rates. Major reasons for dropping out are subject related problems.
Many challenges exist at today’s universities. Next to all these challenges students should get the best education. To improve the educational process and to overcome students’ deficits, we need to know the competencies of our students.
To improve the educational process and to overcome student deficits, we need an instrument to identify the deficits. Moreover, we need such an instrument to measure the benefit of educational interventions. The basis for such an instrument is a competence model that describes which competencies our students should have.
This paper presents a methodology to find out these competencies and how to build a competence model accordingly. Such a competence model is necessary for our next step: Building an assessment to measure competencies. Measuring competencies is useful, for example, to value the benefit of interventions during educational processes.
3. BACKGROUND & RELATED WORK Many of the existing national and international projects, especially in computer science, focus on the competences in schools, for future teachers, key competencies or on ICT key competencies in different subjects [10], [2]. That implies that their main focus is not on subject specific competence. In contrast, there are only a few projects where subject specific competence models are developed. The German projects MoKoM [5] and KUI [1] are two of these. The MoKoM project has its focus on developing a competence model for informatics modeling and system comprehension for students at schools. In contrast to that, the project KUI focuses on competences for future teachers. The KUI competence model is divided into three parts: competencies on subject matter knowledge (CK), competencies on pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and non-cognitive competencies (NCC) [3], [7]. In addition, there are some projects with research in students’ competencies at universities. Nevertheless until now, no national or international project has developed a concrete competence model for subject specific competences in computer science for academics. The only existing models are, for example, the IEEE Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK)[9], the ACM/IEEE Curriculum [10] or the IEEE Software Engineering Competency Model (SWECOM)[4]. Nevertheless the first two documents rather describe knowledge, which should be part of a curriculum than real competencies. The SWECOM describes competencies but for software engineers who participate in development of and modifications to softwareintensive systems not for academics directly after their study. Unfortunately, these documents are additionally not empirically verified. Consequently we don’t know if universities teach the topics mentioned in these curricula/competence models. Only accreditation rules give us a first hint. Moreover, they are not as specific as the ACM/IEEE Curriculum. However, these documents are a good basis for the developing of a concrete competence model. In addition to the missing competence models, there is no assessment for the competences by now.
Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Information Science Education – computer science education.
General Terms Computer science education, engineering education
Model
curricula,
Software
Keywords competence measurement, competence model, eAssessment
1. RESEARCH SITUATION I’m a research associate and Ph.D.-Student at the University of Paderborn, Germany since 2012. There I’m responsible for the Computer Science Learning Center and associate to the CSE research group of Prof. Dr. Johannes Magenheim. Next to my full-time job as research associate I have the opportunity to do my Ph.D.
2. CONTEXT AND MOTIVATION Many challenges exist at today’s Universities in Germany and other countries, for example: increasing numbers of students, tightening up the study process after Bologna and an internationalization of the majors. Next to all these challenges our Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). ICER '14, Aug 11-13 2014, Glasgow, United Kingdom ACM 978-1-4503-2755-8/14/08. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2632320.2632322
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4. STATEMENT OF THESIS/PROBLEM
competence model I decide to concentrate on the coding of these subcategories.
The previous motivation for developing a competence model and an additional assessment results in the following research questions for my thesis: 1.
2.
After developing the competence model, I have to evaluate my competence model with experts, to check if I have considered all important aspects. This competence model is then the basis for the assessment I will develop and test in the last step.
Which facets include computer science competencies in the Area of Software Development, Software Engineering and Programming? (developing a competence model)
7. EXPECTED CONTRIBUTIONS In my thesis, I want to develop a Computer Science Competence Model for the needs of curriculum development and evaluation in Higher Education. The methodology I will use to develop the competence model for the areas of Software Development, Software Engineering and Programming can also be used to develop competence models for other areas of Computer Science.
Can we measure an increase of computer science competencies in the Area of Software Development, Software Engineering and Programming? (developing and evaluation of the test instrument)
5. RESEARCH GOALS & METHODS
With the competence model and the additional assessment I will create, we have the ability to find out the deficits of our students. These concrete results will give computer science departments the opportunity to develop specific interventions to help students in overcoming their deficits and in addition to measure the effect of these interventions accordingly.
Computer Science is a widespread subject with many different areas. This is the reason I focus on the areas of Software Development, Software Engineering and Programming. For these areas, I describe the process of developing the competence model and the assessment for measuring the competencies. To develop the Competence Model I first analyze different Computer Science Bachelor Curricular from all over the world with the deductive content analysis. The content analysis has the aim to find common competences in the different study programs.
8. REFERENCES [1]
The basis for my analysis and my category system is the ACM/IEEE Curriculum [9]. In this curriculum experts defined a catalog with 18 knowledge areas belonging to computer science. Each knowledge area consists of different knowledge units. I use these knowledge areas and units as category system during the content analysis [6]. As text corpus, I use different international computer science bachelor curricula.
[2]
[3]
The results of this curricula analysis give an overview about what the different universities teach and if there is anything like a core knowledge. Referring to this analysis, I will develop a first competence model. Following by a validation of experts, a comparison with other existing research and standards should be done. After this step, I will build the competence model that structures the competencies in competence dimensions and graduate levels for each of these dimensions.
[4]
The results of the content analysis are the starting point to develop an assessment for competence measurement. For this, I have to create different exercises and items. Finally, I need at least one item for each competence mentioned in the competence model. In addition, I have to add the difficulty for each item. This gives the opportunity to measure levels of competences. Consequently levels of competences help to create more specific offers for our students. Furthermore, it gives the opportunity measure the development of competences in a more specific way.
[5]
[6] [7]
With a competence model, items and a psychometric model we can start to measure competencies. However, my aim is to build an eAssessment for the competence measurement. Reasons are different advantages of eAssessment like the instant feedback and the greater flexibility with respect to location and time.
[8]
6. DISSERTATION STATUS
[9]
After coding the curricula, I have analyzed the results. Because the richness in details of the different curricula descriptions varies considerably we do not consider the number of occurrences of a single coding, but only the existence of a coding for a category/subcategory in a curriculum. Half of these subcategories occur in 50% or more of the curricula. For building the
[10]
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