Identity and affect in design cognition

Much Design Research effort has been afforded to investigating how designers think and what they do; often in the form of protocol analysis. These investigations have mainly focused on how designers influence material culture however, little attention has been paid to another line of enquiry; that is how the act of designing affects the individual undertaking the work and the role of social psychological phenomena e.g. attitudes, evaluations, emotions, impressions, motivations and social behaviour - on design activity. This interplay of affect between design activity and a designer’s social psychological behaviour is a complex two way process that warrants further investigation. Our research agenda focuses on the individual undertaking design activity and asks how does designing affect the designer and their behaviour? In this paper two issues are addressed: 1. The immediate effects of design activity on the designer 2. The role of self-concept in design cognition These two issues are investigated through a series of experiments carried out under semi-controlled conditions using several forms of observation and novel self-concept inventories. This paper draws attention to the need to consider self-concept and affect in design cognition and introduces the idea of design identity, which is uniquely different to the concept of design experience often quoted in the literature. This is an area of the ongoing research agenda within the Department of Design and Technology, Loughborough University, UK. Keywords: Design Activity; Design Behaviour; Psychology of Design; Self-Concept; Immediate Effects</p

Covid-19 and Digital Education: a Catalyst For Change?

While education still faces huge challenges, including the rapid shift to online learning, teaching and assessment, there may be some light at the end of the tunnel, writes Tom Crick MBE FBCS, Professor of Digital Education & Policy at Swansea University

The New Curriculum for Wales

Professor Tom Crick outlines the new bilingual Curriculum for Wales, published in January 2020, alongside other major educational system-level reforms in Wales

Building a New National Curriculum for Wales: Practitioners as Curriculum Policy Makers

Wales has followed the direction of England in curriculum policy in recent years, being subject to various iterations of the prescriptive National Curriculum, before political devolution to the National Assembly for Wales in 1999. Since 2015, Wales has been developing a new purpose-led, process-driven curriculum (Donaldson, 2015), in line with international trends towards school autonomy in determining curricular content, child-centred pedagogy and a focus on so-called 21st century skills and competencies (OECD, 2017).The new Curriculum for Wales has been advanced through a co-construction process that has actively engaged practitioners in “Pioneer” school networks, across three phases over a four-year period, from the development of guiding principles to the specification of the six new Areas of Learning and Experience (AoLEs). This research examines the role of practitioners in this process from the viewpoint of embedded policy makers over this period; it primarily focuses on the outcomes of this involvement on practitioner agency and practice, their schools ability to improve under this new system of increased autonomy and subsidiarity, alongside the implications for the wider educational system across Wales.This paper is based around two complementary approaches to provide insight into and analysis of this development of emerging national curriculum policy in Wales, especially focusing on the role of practitioners in promoting educational change. Firstly, it is based upon the experiences of both authors and their direct involvement in the curriculum reform process in Wales over the previous four years: one as a primary school headteacher of eight years who has been seconded to the Welsh Government for the last two years as the Head of Curriculum Design and Development (Golding); the other as a STEM education research academic who has been chairing the development of the Science & Technology AoLE since 2017, having previously chaired the development of a new national Digital Competence Framework in 2015 (Crick). Secondly, this work reflects upon several ongoing research and evaluation projects at the national, regional and school level, to provide external context to this experiential insight, primarily focusing on the Pioneer school model (WISERD, 2017; Arad Research, 2018; Wavehill, 2019) and the practitioners who have been directly involved in the process (Crick & Priestley, 2019)This work casts light on the processes and conditions that can foster practitioner engagement with the formulation of national education policy, the potential weaknesses of such approaches, as well as the wider benefits for practitioners, schools and the system in Wales as a whole. In particular, our insight and evaluation suggests that this approach has long-term implications in the development of a cadre of expert practitioners able to support colleagues in the subsequent enactment of a new national curriculum, through the building of system capacity for curriculum making. Though this critical evaluation of an emerging national case study of education system reform in Wales, we also present a number of recommendations across policy and practice (including initial teacher education, professional learning and school leadership), to provide the foundation for potential replicability and portability to other jurisdictions

Exploring resilience for effective learning in computer science education

Background and context: Many factors have been shown to be important for supporting effective learning and teaching – and thus progression and success – in formal educational contexts. While factors such as key introductory-level computer science knowledge and skills, as well as pre-university learning and qualifications, have been extensively explored, the impact of measures of positive psychology are less well understood for the discipline of computer science. This preliminary work investigates the relationships between effective learning and success, and two measures of positive psychology, Grit (Duckworth’s 12-item Grit scale) [6] and the Nicolson McBride Resilience Quotient (NMRQ) [3], in success in first-year undergraduate computer science to provide insight into the factors that impact on the transition from secondary education into tertiary education

Cybersecurity Education and Formal Methods

Formal methods have been largely thought of in the context of safety-critical systems, where they have achieved major acceptance. Tens of millions of people trust their lives every day to such systems, based on formal proofs rather than "we haven’t found a bug" (yet!); but why is "we haven’t found a bug" an acceptable basis for systems trusted with hundreds of millions of people’s personal data?This paper looks at some of these issues in cybersecurity, and the extent to which formal methods, ranging from "fully verified" to better tool support, could help. More importantly, recent policy reports and curricula initiatives appear to recommended formal methods in the limited context of "safety critical applications"; we suggest this is too limited in scope and ambition. Not only are formal methods needed in cybersecurity, the repeated and very public weaknesses of the cybersecurity industry provide a powerful motivation for formal methods

Restart: The Resurgence of Computer Science in UK Schools

Computer science in UK schools is undergoing a remarkable transformation. While the changes are not consistent across each of the four devolved nations of the UK (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), there are developments in each that are moving the subject to become mandatory for all pupils from age 5 onwards. In this article, we detail how computer science declined in the UK, and the developments that led to its revitalisation: a mixture of industry and interest group lobbying, with a particular focus on the value of the subject to all school pupils, not just those who would study it at degree level. This rapid growth in the subject is not without issues, however: there remain significant forthcoming challenges with its delivery, especially surrounding the issue of training sufficient numbers of teachers. We describe a national network of teaching excellence which is being set up to combat this problem, and look at the other challenges that lie ahead