I’m beginning to see many schools and leaders request support when it comes to showing how disciplinary and substantive knowledge is included in computing in our schools.
The short answer is: they shouldn’t be! These terms are mentioned specifically in OFSTED's research review of Science as well as some other subject reviews, but are not mentioned in the computing review.
It is not appropriate to begin to shoehorn knowledge types into subjects in which the learning is so different. For example; in Science, experiments and investigations are happening all the time and pupils will ‘discover’ new things as they observe. But in languages, there is nothing new; no new words to create, everything is already there to practise and learn. It is different in computing too, as this is an engineering discipline...
The types of knowledge we do need to consider in computing are made clear in OFSTED’s research review on Computing in May 2022, where they mention declarative knowledge (knowing that…) and procedural knowledge (knowing how).
They published a helpful table to demonstrate examples of these knowledge types within the subject, however it was based on secondary activity. Here is my adaptation of the table with a primary focus:
The Teach Computing Curriculum’s Learning graphs (found on the Teach Computing curriculum web page at the start of each unit), are currently being updated to better reflect these types of knowledge and will be available soon.
If you’re still not convinced, let’s take a deeper look at what these terms mean (taken from the OFSTED research review for science):
Substantive knowledge: (knowledge of the products of science, such as concepts, laws, theories and models): this is referred to as scientific knowledge and conceptual understanding in the national curriculum
Disciplinary knowledge: (knowledge of how scientific knowledge is generated and grows): this is specified in the ‘working scientifically’ sections of the national curriculum and it includes knowing how to carry out practical procedures. Disciplinary knowledge is a curricular term. It describes what pupils learn about the diverse ways that science establishes and grows knowledge through scientific enquiry.
Alan Harrison, my fellow leadership specialist for secondary, puts it like this: "Pupils are not using disciplinary knowledge to discover new substantive knowledge. But they are learning how the discipline of science works, so that they understand the world, and maybe will go on to be scientists and much, much later discover new substantive knowledge."
As mentioned previously, although there is no mention of ‘Disciplinary’ and ‘Substantive’ knowledge specifically in the OFSTED’s computing review, they do appear in the OFSTED research and review on Science in April 2021. In this review, they explain what these two types of knowledge are and how they link in with procedural and declarative knowledge, along with some guidance that states we should not attempt to teach them separately.
They say that “disciplinary knowledge involves pupils learning about the many different types of scientific enquiry. It is the knowledge of how scientific knowledge is generated and grows: this is specified in the ‘working scientifically’ sections of the national curriculum and it includes knowing how to carry out practical procedures”. Disciplinary and substantive knowledge also appear in other OFSTED subject reviews, for example Geography and History.
At first glance, substantive and disciplinary knowledge seem similar to declarative and procedural knowledge, and there is some overlap. However, where an example of procedural knowledge may be ‘to know how to use repetition in code’, disciplinary knowledge may lean more towards subject specific approaches that pupils can employ while they are demonstrating that procedural knowledge, such as creating algorithms, applying logic, evaluating or debugging. In fact, one might argue that the term used in the National Curriculum for Computing that best demonstrates disciplinary knowledge is Computational Thinking, brilliantly presented in the Barefoot ‘Computational Thinkers’ poster.
As teachers, we need to give ample opportunities for pupils to demonstrate computational thinking. The Teach Computing Curriculum is underpinned by 12 pedagogical principles that enable pupils to do just that. These could tenuously be described as ways in which we support and encourage the practice of disciplinary knowledge in the classroom, but just as easily fit into the procedural knowledge category. Furthermore, some also argue that in computing, the only disciplinary knowledge being exercised is by experts carrying out scientific enquiries; working at the cutting edge of computational discovery and innovation, which then pupils at primary school level - who are more appropriately forming the foundations of knowing that and knowing how - can begin learning about.
So if you have been asked to include references to substantive and disciplinary knowledge in your computing documents, my advice would be to reference the OFSTED research review and focus only on declarative and procedural knowledge, and not get into confusion. Perhaps send them this blog post to read! All of the experts I’ve asked this very question to say leave substantive and disciplinary knowledge for science, we just don’t need to concern ourselves with it in computing. We may be trying to make things more complicated than they need to be, which could also possibly reflect negatively on us as far as OFSTED are concerned (contradicting their research reviews!) as we are trying to adapt approaches from another subject and squeeze them into computing.
I’d love to hear if you’ve been asked to do this and how you feel about that, please let me know in the comments!