Refocusing the DPI technology and engineering standards
Keeping technical courses technical better prepares students for our high-tech world
For the recent public input portion of the DPI standards review process, I provided the following input on the Technology and Engineering academic standards, based on my professional expertise in technology and engineering.
The Technology and Engineering Standards should be specific to technology and education. Other skills should be consolidated into standards for their specific subjects, not spread across subjects. Such infusion leads to redundancy - a tax on student’s valuable learning time, which will limit their ability to compete in the job market and the US’s ability to compete on the world stage.
Some skills, such as Creativity, Critical Thinking, Communication, and Collaboration, complement Technology and Engineering without distracting from it. Others, such as Global and Cultural Awareness, are better separated into their appropriate subject area (social studies in this case).
Some of the skills embedded in otherwise technical standards should be pulled out into other subjects so that students who don’t take Technology and Engineering electives don’t miss them. For example, ICT1.d.2.m (how different ages and cultures understand the same message differently) and MNF1.c (cultural differences and the feelings of others) should be moved to social studies, and ICT1.a.15.h (how information and communication systems can be used to inform, persuade, entertain, control, manage and educate. ) and ICT1.c.8.h (how a message can be used to manipulate an audience) should be moved to language arts.
Keeping Technology and Engineering focused is critical to ensure time is available to teach the new skills students need to learn. For example, ICT1.f.14.h should include static website generation (e.g., with Hugo). ICT1.f.15.h should be converted to three standards, one for CMSs (e.g., WordPress), one for testing methods, and one for continual integration and deployment methods. There should also be a standard distinguishing authorization and authentication and covering relevant technologies such as OAuth.
The PDF of the existing standards ironically highlights an area that was missing in the last revision and continues to be missing: usability analysis and testing. In the PDF, you can’t search for any of the text in the tables in sections III or IV. If you try to copy and paste any of the text from the tables, it shows up as gibberish. Students should learn that making sure technology looks right on the screen is the beginning of usability, not the end. They need to learn to think through different ways people will use technology and learn to develop quality control systems to ensure products meet usability requirements.
I hope this input helps focus STEM education on the skills needed for career success. A previous standards update for the related subject Computer Science suffered from the same kind of omissions, redundancy, and dilution I described above. For example, there’s an entire section on Impacts of Computing, which duplicates social studies and language arts rather than teaching technology, and yet fundamental technical skills are missing, such as user interface design and complexity analysis of algorithms.
Although schools don’t have to use the DPI standards, there are practical advantages, especially in training and coordination with other organizations. The DPI standards also influence available curricula. That’s why I’m hopeful that the DPI will let technical subjects be technical subjects and avoid taxing students who have much to learn to prepare them for a high-tech and competitive global environment.
