CSAwesome is a new approved curriculum and professional development (PD) provider for the Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science (CS) A high school course. AP courses are taken by secondary (typically ages 14-19) students for college placement and/or credit. CSAwesome's free curriculum and teacher resources were developed in 2019 by adapting the CSA Java Review ebook on the open-source Runestone platform. The goals of CSAwesome are to broaden participation in the AP CSA course and to support new-to-CS students and teachers as they transition from the AP Computer Science Principles (CSP) course to the AP CSA course by using inclusive teachingmore »
This content will become publicly available on August 16, 2022
Developing Empathy and Persistence through Professional Development in New to CSA Teachers
To meet the rising demand for computer science (CS) courses, K-12 educators need to
be prepared to teach introductory concepts and skills in courses such as Computer
Science Principles (CSP), which takes a breadth-first approach to CS and includes
topics beyond programming such as data, impacts of computing, and networks. Educators
are now also being asked to teach more advanced concepts in courses such as the College
Board's Advanced Placement Computer Science A (CSA) course, which focuses on advanced programming using Java and includes topics such as objects, inheritance, arrays, and recursion. Traditional CSA curricula have not used content or pedagogy designed to
engage a broad range of learners and support their success. Unlike CSP, which is attracting
more underrepresented students to computing as it was designed, CSA continues to enroll
mostly male, white, and Asian students [College Board 2019, Ericson 2020, Sax 2020].
In order to expand CS education opportunities, it is crucial that students have an
engaging experience in CSA similar to CSP. Well-designed differentiated professional
development (PD) that focuses on content and pedagogy is necessary to meet individual
teacher needs, to successfully build teacher skills and confidence to teach CSA, and
to improve engagement with students [Darling-Hammond 2017]. It is critical that as
more CS opportunities and courses are developed, teachers more »
- Award ID(s):
- 2031361
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10294918
- Journal Name:
- ICER 2021: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 443 to 443
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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