Communications of the ACM

Vviewpoints

I M A G E F R O M S H U T T E R S T O C K . C O M

The truth offers more optimism than this. We have a body of evidence supporting specific, replicable practices for creating agile, student-responsive classrooms that provably scale to large classes, reduce failure rates, and broaden participation. Broad awareness and adoption of these evidence-based teaching practices can help address our teaching challenges and reinvigorate

AS COMPUTING BECOMES more pervasive, we see increased demand from students eager to start a career in computing, and also from students in related disciplines recognizing the need for computer science skills. The result is increased overall enrollments—in some schools, by a factor of three in the past five years.a,b Higher enrollment leads to ballooning class sizes. Schools struggle to hire and retain faculty in the face of heavy courting by industry. The result is that a sense of resource scarcity dominates the high-pressure environment of large class sizes.

The new challenges compound
existing teaching-related challenges
for the field. We still need to broaden
participation in our field, with the low-
est percentage of women majors in all
of STEM.c The economic rewards of a
computing career make it even more
important to bridge the digital divide.
If there are more students than faculty
can teach effectively, they may be in-
clined to lean on a pessimistic belief
a http://www.geekwire.com/2014/analysis-exam-
ining-computer-science-education-explosion/
BoomCamp.pdf
c https://ngcproject.org/statistics
that success is dependent on “bril-
liance” and innate ability where only
a subset of students can succeed. If CS
faculty feel there is little they can do
to change students’ outcomes in their
individual classrooms, it will be true.
Research shows that more CS faculty
hold this mistaken and unproductive
view of students than faculty in other
STEM disciplines. 3
Education