Unpacking Dispositions in the CC2020 Computing Curriculum Overview Report

Abstract

Computing Curriculum models have been historically framed from a cognitive perspective. Typically, the focus has been on bodies of knowledge and increasingly the notion of supporting skills and abilities. More recent curriculum documents such as the IT2017 curriculum have moved towards a professional competency approach and have included the further important notion of dispositions.While these dispositions are seen as complementing and supporting the traditional elements of knowledge and skills, exactly how they are conceptualised and operationalised is still being developed. The ACM/IEEE-CS Computing Curriculum 2020 Overview Project (CC2020) has been working towards this goal, in part driven by the very practical purpose of enabling visualisation of the multiple components of the existing and differing curriculum reports, incorporating the notion of dispositions and enabling them to be mapped to clusters of knowledge and skills embodied in selected curriculum statements.This paper reports on progress to date towards conceptualising and operationalising the notion of dispositions within the CC2020 project, reviews the research challenges faced, the models adopted and the findings to date.