ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

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This quarterly publication is a quarterly journal that publishes refereed articles addressing issues of computing as it impacts the lives of people with disabilities. The journal will be of particular interest to SIGACCESS members and delegrates to its affiliated conference (i.e., ASSETS), as well as other international accessibility conferences.

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if young women
“decide they’re
not interested in
computer science at
the end of 8th grade,”
says Stephen Cooper,
“there’s nothing we
can do at the college
level to change that.”

who has helped coordinate NSF’s sup-
port for the development of the new
course. “What’s more, AP is taught all
over the country, and schools like AP
because it makes them look academic.”
Managing the way computer science
is taught can be a challenge even for
countries that do have a standard na-
tional curriculum. Israel, for example,
has several well-regarded computer sci-
ence programs at the secondary level,
but the subject is considered an elec-
tive. According to Tami Lapidot, execu-
tive manager of Machshava, the Israeli
National Center for Computer Science
Teachers, some officials and adminis-
trators still fail to understand the im-
portance of the subject. “[They] think
that CS and Facebook are the same,” she
explains. “In the Ministry of Education,
CS is not considered a scientific subject
but rather a technology subject.”
England, by contrast, made Infor-
mation Communications Technology
(ICT) compulsory 12 years ago, but left
the syllabus quite broad. “It did allow
more interesting stuff if the teachers
were so minded,” explains Steve Furb-
er, ICL Professor Of Computer Engi-
neering at the University of Manchester
and chair of a Royal Society advisory
group whose report, Shut Down or Re-
start? The Way Forward for Computing
in UK Schools, was released in January.
“But an awful lot of schools identified
the lowest common denominator and
were teaching ICT through fairly rou-
tine Office applications.” Shut Down
or Restart points to a nexus of interre-
lated factors that reinforce the status
quo, where ICT is delivered in the form
of digital literacy lessons, dismissed by
students as uninteresting, and further
devalued by schools. Indeed, several
recent reports—and the 2011 Mac-
Taggart Lecture by Google executive
chairman Eric Schmidt, in which he
warned that the U.K.’s IT curriculum
“focuses on teaching how to use soft-
ware, but gives no insight into how
it’s made”—have underscored the
importance of improving the coun-
try’s computer science instruction.
Would-be reformers were therefore
quite encouraged when Secretary of
State for Education Michael Gove an-
nounced the “disapplication” of the
current ICT curriculum, along with
plans to replace it with a more aca-
demically rigorous alternative.

A Lack of Qualified teachers

Yet even as curricula improve, a larger challenge looms for international computer science education: attracting qualified teachers and keeping them abreast of new developments in a fast-changing field. Many teachers have had no formal training in computer science, coming instead from domains like math, business, and physics. “That isn’t to say we don’t have a lot of great teachers—we do,” explains Jan Cuny. “But students don’t go into the field thinking they’re going to be teachers, and we don’t do a good job of telling them that could be an important thing to do.” In England, only 30% of high school computer science teachers have qualifications that are recognized by the nation’s Department for Education (as opposed to 75%–80% in established subjects). In the U.S., only half of the states even have certification programs in the first place.

Encouragingly, a number of initiatives have sprung up to address the