BRAINSTORMING An Integrated Curriculum
Ideas for Study Groups – Karen North, January 2, 2001
What math prerequisite skills are really important in Computer Science?
- Estimating an answer
Needed – arithmetic tables, fractions, percents
Use – spreadsheet with multiplication/addition facts to 15, prefix notation expressions
- Data Analysis
Needed – descriptive identifiers, labels
Use – only words, leave numbers blank
- Discovering patterns in word problems
Needed - Compare and contrast
Use – discussion, essay thinking, graphics
- Applying formulas – functions and variables
Needed – abstract thinking transition from concrete
Use – program design, TeachScheme! –
It is time to stop talking and do something!
“Our schools fail to provide for the educational and personal identify needs of teenagers. The facts are ominous. Falling SAT scores, poor showing on achievement tests in comparison with young from other countries..”
David Elkind, 1984 – “All Grown Up & No Place to Go – Teenagers in Crisis”
“Many 17 year old do not possess the “higher order” intellectual skills we should expect of them... only one-third can solve a mathematics problem requiring several steps.”
National Commission on Excellence in Education report, 1983
Brain maintenance
Do we have a “cafeteria style curriculum” with a “smorgasbord” of courses? Which are the appetizers and desserts and which are the main courses? The “progressive education” movement in the 1930s and 1940s emphasized business arithmetic over geometry; learning techniques of selecting an occupation over algebra. The battle continues. In the 1980s The National Commission on Excellence in Education said the “secondary school curriculum has been homogenized, diluted and diffused to the point that they no longer have a central purpose.”
An integrated curriculum can foster growth both on the personal and the intellectual level. HISD Superintendent Rod Paige and high school reformers are looking at ways to make coursework more relevant and challenging mathematically for students. When a student learns something in one class that sheds light on another, there is growth by differentiation and integration. Such learning adds to a student’s sense of intellectual integration and to their sense of personal integration. That learning becomes their knowledge, something they can use.
Data is raw facts, information is organized data, and knowledge is applied information. Teachers through study groups can integrate assignments to foster intellectual growth and maintain mastery of required skills. One assignment for three courses increases motivation to complete the work. When new situations are too different from original learning the student gets turned off to learning. Knowledge kept in separate categories cannot be brought together. Teachers need create the relationships through an integrated curriculum.
Programming
When a student fails, it is not always related to laziness or an interest in other things. Sometimes they cannot really understand what is going on and find the experience frustrating. The age that a student attains formal operations varies. In the book, “All Grown Up & No Place to Go, Teenagers in Crisis,” David Elkins wrote the following in 1984 concerning formal operations and programming:
Consider what this means for a young person’s evolving sense of self. Computer courses are a case in point. Learning and fully understanding computer programming and computer languages such as BASIC, Pascal, or FORTRAN require formal operations. It makes sense, therefore, to teach programming at the higher grades – tenth, eleventh, and twelfth – when most students have probably attained formal operations. But suppose a young man or woman who has not yet attained formal operations takes a course in computer programming and discovers that he or she can’t figure out what is going on. In most cases the student will not blame the teacher or the test or his or her enrollment in the course. More often these students will blame themselves and incorporate the notion that they cannot understand computers into their definition of themselves. Given today’s world (1984), such a self-perception can be a serious vocational and emotional handicap.
Learning computer programming should be compared to learning Greek and Latin. Few students, unless they become programmers, are going to use their programming skills, any more then they will the dead languages. Nevertheless, a knowledge of Latin gives us a deeper and clearer sense of the English language and of history and culture then we would have achieved without it. Learning Latin helps students to further distinguish themselves as speakers of a particular type of language and to integrate their knowledge with that of the world. Knowing a computer language has the same differentiating and integrating effect. The teenager who knows one or more computer languages is in a good position to understand the application of computers in many different fields. At the same time, these skills add to the teenager’s sense of competence and self-esteem.
If learning computer languages is understood as analogous to learning dead languages, then we will have put it in the right perspective. Students do not need to learn programming in order to use computers any more then they need to learn Latin to use English. But learning programming can be put in the service of mental discipline and as such should find a place in the core curriculum, provided that students who take the course have attained formal operations.
Math phobia
One of my students told me he did not understand because I did not show him how to do it. I suggested he go to the board so I could walk him through it. Another student volunteered to do the walk-through. The student that had the learning problem still did not understand because he did not do the work to learn. Does this student know how to learn? Or, is this student frustrated because he is physically not ready to learn abstract material? Or, perhaps the student is ready, but more practice in thinking skills through repetition in an integrated curriculum is needed. Could this require an “Auchan” method to motivate the student to assume responsibility for learning?
Algebraic computation
Can an Introduction to Programming Course assist students in making the transition to formal abstract thinking? Texas used to have a computer math course whose goal was to practice basic skills. That was eliminated with the intent that these concepts would be integrated into the regular math courses. How many math teachers use their TI calculators for programming?
What can we do?
HISD was one of 10 districts to get a $40 million implement grant to reform high schools. Key components are small classes, Internet, and integrated subjects. We could write a grant to fund combo courses such as Technology Systems/Algebra I, Geometry/Web Mastering, Art/Web Mastering, Algebra II/Computer Science, grade level Science/Math and History/English courses. Two teachers could team or one teacher could teach two subjects where they have the same block of students on alternating days. Anyone who wanted to work in teams could make connections. Advantage might be class size would be limited and no late enrollment.
(Numbers from Houston Chronicle, 12/26/00, Section A)
Communicate – Record your Thoughts and Email
Notes
D.P. Gardner and Y.W. Larsen, A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, U.S. Dept. of Edu., 1983)
Integration Advocates: educators such as Eliot, Conant, and Hutchins.
David Elkind, All Grown Up & No Place to Go, Teenagers in Crisis, 1984, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.