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Assessing the impact of regional or statewide interventions in primary and secondary school (K-12) computer science (CS) education is difficult for a variety of reasons. Qualitative survey data provide only a limited view of impacts, but quantitative data can be notoriously difficult to acquire at scale from large numbers of classrooms, schools, or local educational authorities. In this paper, we use several publicly available data sources to glean insights into public high school CS enrollments across an entire U.S. state. Course enrollments with NCES course codes and local descriptors, school-level demographic data, and school geographic attendance boundaries can be combined to highlight where CS offerings persist and thrive, how CS enrollments change over time, and the ultimate quantitative impact of a statewide intervention. We propose a more appropriate level of data aggregation for these types of quantitative studies than has been undertaken in previous work while demonstrating the importance of a contextual aggregation process. The results of our disparate impact analysis for the first time quantify the impact of a statewide Exploring Computer Science (ECS) program rollout on economic groups across the region. Our blueprint for this analysis can serve as a template to guide and assess large-scale K-12 CS interventions wherever detailed project evaluation methods cannot scale to encompass the entire study area, especially in cases where attribute heterogeneity is a significant issue.
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Analyzing K-12 Education as a Complex System
Schools and school districts are complex, dynamic systems affected by numerous factors, specific to the particular environment. These factors, which range from the stability of the home life of the enrolled children, to the interpersonal relationships of the school staff, to the funding decisions of the school board, to the laws passed by the U.S. Congress (and innumerable additional factors in between), all interact in sometimes predictable but often completely surprising ways. Educational initiatives and interventions that work well in one environment can prove completely ineffective (or un-implementable) in a different school setting, for a myriad of reasons. For university faculty and STEM professionals who partner with K-12 schools to implement and assess STEM educational reform initiatives, particularly for those who choose to work or scale up projects in non-charter or non-specialized lab school settings, the complexity of the system of K-12 education makes it difficult to identify all the potential barriers that can impact the proposed project. Unexpected factors can easily derail an otherwise well thought-out project, both in terms of project implementation and also in the success of assessing student outcomes. Educational researchers have long studied school reform and the issues of what facilitates and hinders success in curricular and other interventions. Experts in educational policy and public policy also have studied the interaction of policies and practices of reform agendas within social and organizational contexts. Industrial engineering, which had its origins in studying manufacturing systems, is a field where researchers have made great contributions towards understanding complex systems including transportation systems, financial systems, health care, and even recently humanitarian support systems. The Advanced Manufacturing and Prototyping Integrated to Unlock Potential (AMP-IT-UP) NSF Math/Science Partnership at the Georgia Institute of Technology is creating an innovative framework, which is both conceptual and theoretical and rooted within the field of industrial and systems engineering, to examine barriers and enablers to school change and reform. The framework describes the system in terms of both agents and the attributes of those agents and will become the foundation for identifying a subset of attribute combinations that allow for successful change in the system. In this paper we describe the first step in creating this framework, namely identifying the agents within K-12 education and the attributes of these agents that are critical to educational change. The paper also presents a sample scale for describing these attributes.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1238089
- PAR ID:
- 10058532
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASEE annual conference & exposition
- ISSN:
- 2153-5965
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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