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The Adapt, Implement, and Research at Nebraska (AIR@NE) project, funded by the NSF CSforAll Researcher-Practitioner Partnership (RPP) program, examines the adaptation of a validated K-8 Computer Science (CS) curriculum in diverse school districts statewide. Our Research-Practitioner Partnership is primarily between the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the Lincoln Public Schools, and other diverse school districts across Nebraska. Our primary goal is to study and document how different districts, including rural, predominantly minority, and Native American reservation, adopt the curriculum and broaden participation in CS. In addition, the project is developing instructional capacity for K-8 CS education with diverse learners. Our research also adapts and develops teacher and student CS assessments, and documents case studies using design-based research methodology to show how an adaptive curriculum broadens CS participation. Our Professional Development (PD) program for K-8 CS teachers is comprehensive. It consists of three summer courses for each cohort and a series of workshops during the academic year. Of the three summer courses, two are administered in the first year for a cohort: (1) an introduction to computer science course where teachers learn fundamental CS topics and programming in a high-level programming language (e.g., Python), and engage in problem solving and practice computational thinking, and (2) a course in pedagogy for teachers to learn how to teach K-8 CS, including lesson designs, use of instructional resources such as dot-and-dash robots, and assessments. Then, the following academic year after the summer, the PD program holds a series of workshops on five separate Saturdays to support teacher implementation of their lesson modules during the academic year, reflect and improve on their lessons, reinforce on CS concepts and pedagogy techniques, review and adopt alternative instructional resources, and share insights. These Saturday workshops also facilitate further community building and resource sharing. The third course occurs in the second year for a cohort, involving dissemination of research results from the team to the teachers, opportunities to discuss new resources and approaches on teaching CS concepts and computational thinking, and sharing of experiences and insights after teachers have completed one academic year of teaching CS. Unlike the first two courses that are required of teachers, this third course is an opt-in course that combines more in- depth pedagogy and elements of leadership. Thus far, we have had two cohorts and used the design methodology to revise our PD program, making our design more robust based on the lessons learned over the two years. The course materials, assessment, and survey instruments have also been improved. While the project is on-going we have data to that indicates the impact of the work so far. There were significant pre-post gains for both cohorts in teachers’ knowledge of computer science concepts and computational thinking. Scores on the computational thinking assessment were higher than those for CS concepts, which was to be expected given their CS teaching experience. Moreover, in both cohorts, the teachers’ confidence in teaching CS improved significantly.
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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
- 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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