Empirical Foundation of Central Concepts for Computer Science Education

Abstract

The design of computer science curricula should rely on central concepts of the discipline rather than on technical short-term developments. Several authors have proposed lists of basic concepts or fundamental ideas in the past. However, these catalogs were based on subjective decisions without any empirical support. This article describes the empirical determination of central concepts for computer science education. Experts of computer science rated 49 concepts regarding four criteria. The cluster analysis of the data revealed the following central concepts: problem, data, computer, test, algorithm, process, system, information, language, communication, software, program, computation, structure , and model .

Educational measures to computer science concepts: Degree of process-related coverage and degree of educational accessibility

“…The empirical determination of the educational measures for computer science education builds on the results of the taxonomies of content and process concepts in computer science (Zendler & Spannagel, 2008;Zendler, Spannagel, & Klaudt, 2009, Zendler, McClung, & Klaudt, 2012.…”

“…In the first study (Zendler & Spannagel, 2008) under the aspect of the structure of the discipline approach, 37 professors of computer science assessed 49 content concepts of computer science that had previously been selected by a frequency analysis of the ACM Computing Classification System (1998 Version) 1 . The content concepts were assessed by horizontal, vertical, time and sense criteria (cf.…”

“…Thus, the adaptation of the MDS configuration with dimensionality 2 to the raw data can be assessed as being acceptable after a comparison with the simulation results from Borg and Groenen (2005, chapter 3). For the interpretation of the dimensions of the MDS configuration, reference is made to the data set in Figure 1, for one, and to the relevant literature on computer science education, for another (Nievergelt, 1980(Nievergelt, , 1990Schwill, 1994;Gal-Ezer & Harel, 1999;Tucker et al, 2003Tucker et al, , 2006Denning, 2003;GI, 2008;Zendler & Spannagel, 2008).…”

“…The structure of the discipline approach is used in the context of fundamental ideas (Schwill, 1994;Wursthorn, 2005;Armoni & Ginat, 2008), threshold concepts (Eckerdal et al, 2006), and empirically determined central content concepts of computer science (Zendler & Spannagel, 2008). It is a starting point for curricular improvements (Franklin & Johnson, 2008).…”

Teaching software modeling in computing curricula

“…For instance, the ACM/IEEE curriculum guidelines for Software Engineering programs provide valuable input on curriculum design, in particular the perceived relevance or importance of various topics [16,24,27] [32,33,34] did several cluster analyses to investigate central concepts for computer science education. The results of these works will be discussed in some more detail in Section 4.4.1.…”