Working Group 5: Multinational perspectives on the development and assessment of professional values in CS - Proposal PDF

Computing is an academic discipline that "combines the ethos of the scholar with that of the professional". CS degrees are expected to introduce students to professional practice, inducting them into the shared values and attitudes of the community of computing professionals, as well as delivering subject-specific knowledge and understanding, together with technical and transferable skills.

Traditionally, professional issues have been explored primarily through the discussion of ethical dilemmas. Whitbeck shows the limitations of this approach, recommending the study of more open-ended and context-sensitive problem situations.

Ethical and professional values are held both individually and collectively. These values should guide the behaviour of computing professionals at all times in their professional activity, so it is essential that they are internalised by each individual. They must be linked to the person's wider ethical and personal values, and so the development of professional values has to be an individual process. On the other hand, professionals need the support of the collectivity to legitimate their choice of behaviour in difficult circumstances and the collectivity needs to regulate the professional behaviour of its members in order to uphold its reputation. There is evidence that members of professional ethical panels typically have highly divergent ethical frameworks and yet they have a high degree of accord when making decisions on real cases.

We therefore hypothesise that
H1. There is considerable agreement about large regions of professional values amongst computing professionals.

By no means all teachers of computer science consider themselves to be computing professionals. For some this is because they come from another discipline, such as mathematics or business. Others see themselves as scientists rather than practitioners. This may mean that their personal professional values are legitimately not closely aligned to those of a computing professional. Nevertheless we hypothesise that there is a shared core and that
H2. There is considerable agreement about large regions of professional values amongst teachers of computing.

Recent graduates of a computer science programme of study might have a set of professional values that fall somewhere between those of computing professionals and computing academics. On the one hand, their views of ethics and professional values will have been influenced by the teaching they have received, both formally and subliminally. On the other hand, they predominantly aspire to become computing professionals.

In the period before the conference, the members of the working group will refine these hypotheses and then test them by sending questionnaires to current students, computing academics and IT practitioners. This will provide the background for the work of the group during the conference.

At the conference the working group will:

• Critically review the literature on professional values in the CS curriculum.
• Analyse the results of the questionnaires completed before the conference.
• Propose a small number of curriculum developments that could enable professional development to be developed in the curriculum and assessed in the affective domain.
• Suggest how these developments could be evaluated. Computing and Information Technology Curriculum.

Expected prior experience of members

This working group proposal is motivated by the response to the proposers' discussion session at the 7th Baltic Sea Conference on Computing Education Research November 2007 and their paper at ITiCSE 2008. A number of participants at those conferences expressed an interest in carrying this work forward. Potential working group members should have an interest in professional practice in the computing curriculum, in particular in the possible roles of professional values. They need to be in a position to carry out a small survey in their home institution or among computing professionals in their local area. They will be expected to assist with the analysis of survey data.

Please also see the information about Applying to be a Working Group Member on the Working Group page.

Working Group 5 leaders

• Ursula Fuller - University of Kent, United Kingdom
• Bob Keim - University of Kent, United Kingdom