In recent years, Wyoming has developed Computer Science (CS) standards for adoption and use within K-12 classrooms. These standards, adopted in January of 2022, go into effect for the 2022-2023 school year. The University of Wyoming has offered two different computer science week-long professional developments for teachers. Many K-12 teachers do not have a CS background, so developing CS lessons plans can be a challenge in these PDs.This research study is centered around three central questions: 1) To what extent did K-12 teachers integrate computing topics into their PD created lesson plans; 2) How do the teacher perceptions from the two CS PDs compare to each other; and 3) How was the CS PD translated to classroom activity? The first PD opportunity (n=14), was designed to give hands-on learning with CS topics focused on cybersecurity. The second PD opportunity (n=28), focused on integrating CS into existing curricula. At the end of each of these PDs, teacher K-12 teachers incorporated CS topics into their selected existing lesson plan(s). Additionally, a support network was implemented to support excellence in CS education throughout the state. This research study team evaluated the lesson plans developed during each PD event, by using a rubric on each lesson plan. Researchers collected exit surveys from the teachers. Implementation metrics were also gathered, including, how long each lesson lasted, how many students were involved in the implementation, what grades the student belonged to, the basic demographics of the students, the type of course the lesson plan was housed in, if the K-12 teacher reached their intended purpose, what evidence the K-12 teacher had of the success of their lesson plan, data summaries based on supplied evidence, how the K-12 teachers would change the lesson, the challenges and successes they experienced, and samples of student work. Quantitative analysis was basic descriptive statistics. Findings, based on evaluation of 40+ lessons, taught to over 1500 K-12 students, indicate that when assessed on a three point rubric of struggling, emerging, or excellent - certain components (e.g., organization, objectives, integration, activities & assessment, questions, and catch) of K-12 teacher created lessons plans varied drastically. In particular, lesson plan organization, integration, and questions each had a significant number of submissions which were evaluated as "struggling" [45%, 46%, 41%] through interesting integration, objectives, activities & assessment, and catch all saw submissions which were evaluated as "excellent" [43%, 48%, 43%, 48%]. The relationship between existing K-12 policies and expectations surfaces within these results and in combination with other findings leads to implications for the translation of current research practices into pre-collegiate PDs.
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WySLICE - Integrating Computer Science throughout Existing K-12 Core Disciplinary Areas
Wyoming recently mandated that computer science instruction be provided in K-12 schools by 2022, and there is an urgent need for designing instruction that can integrate computer science into the teaching of other subjects. This project assembles a network improvement community comprised of partners from the University of Wyoming, community colleges, Wyoming school districts, the Wyoming Library System, the Wyoming Department of Education, and local software development firms. The community meets once monthly over the duration of the project to collaborate stakeholder agendas for meeting the project goals. The community enlists K-8 teachers from across the state to experience professional development and collaborate on integrating computer science into their instruction of STEM and social science topics. The project is producing units for teachers, who are implementing these units with support from master teachers and educational scholars. The community serves as a forum for teachers to debrief and learn from each other about ways to improve their instruction and design of the curricular units. Libraries in the state system act as partners for dissemination to rural areas of the innovative instructional approaches.
WySLICE prepares 150 K-8 teachers and state librarians from all disciplines to integrate computer science into their teaching. The project is reaching almost half of all K-8 students in Wyoming. The research questions address how teachers use modeling practices as supports for student understanding of algorithms and coding in a variety of ways. The curricula involve cybersecurity as well as other topics relevant to measurement in mathematics and social studies topics that involve social concerns like voting. Data sources include teacher lesson plans and recordings of their instructional implementation, scoring of each of these according to a rubric, meeting notes of monthly meetings, and results from pre-post student assessments. The evaluation focuses on the meeting of project goals and the quality of the management of the network improvement community. This project is jointly funded by CS for All and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under DRL Grant #1923542 "CS For All:RPP - Booting Up Computer Science in Wyoming."
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- Award ID(s):
- 1923542
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10343803
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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