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   Northrop, Laura; Kelly, Sean (January 2016, Urban Education)
2. Impact of In-School Suspension on Black Girls’ Math Course-Taking in High School

   https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10070272  

   Ibrahim, Habiba; Barnes, David L.; Butler-Barnes, Sheretta T.; Johnson, Odis (July 2021, Social Sciences)

   Black girls are more likely to receive in-school suspension (ISS) in comparison to their non-Black peers. However, research on the effect of in-school suspension on students’ academic achievement, specifically math achievement of Black girls, is still very limited. Mathematics is an important foundational component of science, technology, and engineering fields, which are domains in which Black girls are underrepresented. Using the nationally representative Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002), this study explores the relationship between in-school suspension and the highest math course completed in a multi-level analysis of 860 Black female participants from 320 high schools. Our findings revealed that in-school suspension was associated with lower mathematics course-taking. Implications for policy, practice, and research are discussed. 

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3. Capstone Courses in Middle School

   Berry, Kenneth (July 2021, ASEE annual conference)

   null (Ed.)

   Capstone courses provide teachers the opportunity to address the 4 Cs for job skills: Collaboration, Creativity, Communications and Critical Thinking. These are the skills that industry has identified as important for employee success. Engineering schools have developed Introduction to Engineering Design courses to introduce students to these skills. This paper describes a school district that is attempting to add a capstone course at the end of their eighth grade year. The paper discusses their challenges and how they addressed the challenges. 

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4. Neural Networks in Middle School

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3677610  

   Touretzky, David S; Chen, Angela; Pawar, Neel (September 2024, ACM Inroads)

   The planetary model of the atom is alive and well in middle school science class—and in popular iconography—despite most educated adults’ awareness of its shortcomings. The model persists because it is easily visualized, intuitively understandable, and expresses important truths. Models don’t have to get everything right to be useful. Middle schoolers would be overwhelmed by a more correct description of electron orbitals as probability densities satisfying the Schrödinger equation. Better to just show orbitals as ellipses. In the current era, when immensely powerful AI technologies built on neural networks are rapidly disrupting the world, K-12 students need age-appropriate models of neural networks just as they need age-appropriate models of atoms. We suggest the linear threshold unit as the best model for introducing middle school students to neural computation, and we present an interactive tool, Neuron Sandbox, that facilitates their learning. 

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5. SportSense: Engaging youth in data science experience in in-school and out-of-school K-12 contexts

   Worsley, Marcelo; Quiterio, Ashley; Kumar, Vishesh; Smith, Michael; Bodon, Herminio; Butler, Meg (February 2025, Data Science for Everyone)

   For the past several years, our team has been developing and implementing curriculum and tools for integrating sports in data science learning experiences. We have developed a collection of activities and tools that we are eager to share with the larger data science community. The purpose of this session is to give participants an opportunity to explore some of these tools and activities in community with other data science educators and learners. The workshop will also serve as a space to try designing some new activities and ideate future directions for this work within the specific contexts of each workshop participant. Hence, we propose this workshop as a set of resources and a community that might spur new ideas that participants can adapt and extend based on the goals, needs, and affordances of their respective contexts. 

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