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Numerous African American and Hispanic Students with disabilities are confronted with systemic and policy-based challenges preventing access to K-12 STEM-related and computer science education. In addition, the African American and Hispanic Students with Disabilities in the Computer Science Research Alliance conducted an NSF-funded study to understand teachers’ perceptions of district and school policies and practices that hinder the participation of African American and Hispanic students with disabilities in computer science education in Central Texas. The project’s research study fills a critical gap in the literature concerning the systemic barriers affecting African American and Hispanic students with disabilities in K12 computer science education.
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Accessible Computer Science for K-12 Students with Hearing Impairments
An inclusive science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce is needed to maintain America’s leadership in the scientific enterprise. Increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in STEM, including persons with disabilities, requires national attention to fully engage the nation’s citizens in transforming its STEM enterprise. To address this need, a number of initiatives, such as AccessCSforALL, Bootstrap, and CSforAll, are making efforts to make Computer Science inclusive to the 7.4 million K-12 students with disabilities in the U.S. Of special interest to our project are those K-12 students with hearing impairments. American Sign Language (ASL) is the primary means of communication for an estimated 500,000 people in the United States, yet there are limited online resources providing Computer Science instruction in ASL. This paper introduces a new project designed to support Deaf/Hard of Hearing (D/HH) K-12 students and sign interpreters in acquiring knowledge of complex Computer Science concepts. We discuss the motivation for the project and an early design of the accessible block-based Computer Science curriculum to engage D/HH students in hands-on computing education.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1842092
- PAR ID:
- 10172555
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.08476.pdf (Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Applications and Practice)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/978-3-030-49108-6_13
