Maria Knobelsdorf, University of Dortmund, Germany - Didaktik der ...

Computers and Communications Devices (CC): the students
should understand the elements of modern computers and communication
devices and be able to use them competently.
Community, global and ethical impacts (CG) deals with ethical
norms, responsibility and general awareness. The students need to
be informed about privacy and security topics, and develop a
certain sense for ethically correct choices and appropriate social
networking behavior. It is important to understand the positive but
also negative impacts computers and technology might have on
everyone’s life.
6. METHODOLOGY
6.1 Selection of Curricula
As already mentioned in the introduction, the results that are
presented here were produced by students during a seminar that is
part of a teacher education program. Under these circumstances it
was not possible to investigate the adoption of all 174 standards.
Also, it would have taken too much time to analyze the curricula
of all Austrian school types (which are numerous, see section 4).
Thus we had to select several curricula and an appropriate subset
of standards for our research. As computer science education in
Austria does not take place before secondary education, we decided
to focus on the curricula of several important types of secondary
schools, which are described in the following subsections.
6.1.1 AHS
The “Allgemeinbildende Höhere Schule” is the school type with
the broadest form of higher education. Schools that belong to this
category include the so-called “Gymnasium” and the “Bundesoberstufenrealgymnasium”
(BORG). An AHS is a school with
focus on a comprehensive and broad general education that lays
the foundations for the studies at a university. The AHS is divided
into an “Unterstufe”, comprising the grades 5 to 8, and an “Oberstufe”
that consists of grades 9 to 12. After successfully passing
the “Unterstufe”, students may subsequently attend the “Oberstufe”,
but instead they might also choose to attend a different
school like a BHS, which will be explained in the chapter below,
or might switch to vocational education and training. Furthermore,
the AHS distinguishes between three kinds of branches:
The “Gymnasium”, the “Realgymnasium” and the
“wirtschaftskundliche Realgymnasium”. After the sixth grade,
students have to decide for one of these three branches. All of
them follow almost the same curriculum, except a few specializations
for each branch. The main focus of the “Gymnasium” is on
languages, whereas the “Realgymnasium” goes deeper into mathematics
and natural sciences. The “wirtschaftkundliche Realgymnasium”,
specializes in economics, chemistry, psychology and
philosophy. However, these three types are still targeted on general
education and cannot be compared to e.g. the BHS, which are
much more specialized schools aiming for a certain career path.
6.1.2 HTLs for Informatics and for Chemistry
This type of school (“Höhere Technische Lehranstalt”) is mostly
associated with a strong technical and scientific education. However,
there are numerous fields of specialization like Computer
Science, Business Administrations, Chemistry, IT, Networking,
Mechanics, Design and many more. We analyzed the curricula of
two branches that might represent the opposite end of the CSE
spectrum: First, the branch dedicated specifically to computer
sciences, and second, the branch for Chemistry that has probably
the minimal CSE implementation. These two extreme values
should delimit the range of CSE in all the HTL curricula.
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Because of the large variety of specializations, each branch of
HTL has its own specialized curriculum. However, there is also a
basic/core curriculum for all of the branches which describes the
respective competencies that the students should have by the end
of their studies. The specialized branch-curricula then make
changes and amendments to the basic/core curriculum in order to
put importance on the respective focus of the branch.
6.1.3 HLW
The “Höhere Lehranstalt für Wirtschaftliche Berufe” has its focus
clearly on business administrations and tourism, although other
specializations exist. This curriculum should serve as a counterexample
to the very technical HTL curricula.
Other schools like HAK (Handelsakademien) or Tourism schools
have different specializations, though they cover pretty much the
same computer science topics, as HLWs. For this, and timesaving
reasons, only the curriculum for HLWs will be sampled
out. Since 2009, the curriculum regarding computer science
courses got revised and adapted. Actuality is very important and,
therefore, the revised curriculum of 2009 will serve as the basis
for comparison. The new curriculum proposes two mandatory
computer science courses for all students attending a HLW. These
two are titled Office- and Information-Management and Applied
Informatics.
6.2 Selection of Standards
When looking at the subset of selected curricula, it becomes
obvious that all of them are located at the higher secondary level,
from the 9 th to the 12 th /13 th grade. Comparing this to the CSTA
standards framework, it seems suitable to limit the regarded set of
standards to level 3A as, according to the CSTA, the standards of
this level should be implemented throughout the whole range of
upper secondary schools. Level 3B and 3C already represent indepth
specializations that are not to be intended by schools of all
types, but only at the ones that focus on computer sciences. In
consequence, as the viewpoint of this paper lies on general education,
we will restrict our investigations to the competencies subset
of level 3A.
The table 8 in the appendix lists the standards of CSTA Level 3A,
which we have chosen as a reference for our research about the
adoption by the curricula of the selected school types listed
above.
6.3 The Measure of Adoption
To measure the degree of the adoption of the standards by the
curricula, we had to define, under which condition a standard can
be considered as implemented.
It has to be mentioned that it is not possible to look for literal
incorporations, since, first, Austrian curricula are not written or
available in English and, secondly, this would not detect all forms
of implementations. Thus it seems more suitable to look for
equivalents in content, meaning that the described competencies
have to be featured in the respective curricula in some respect.
For this, it seems appropriate to not only rate if standards were
fully implemented or not, but also whether the standard has been
implemented partially. For this, we applied the scoring scale that
is shown in table 1.