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Broadening the participation of underrepresented students in computer science fields requires careful design and implementation of culturally responsive curricula and technologies. Culturally Situated Design Tools (CSDTs) address this by engaging students in historic, cultural, and meaningful design projects based on community practices. To date, CSDT research has only been conducted in short interventions outside of CS classrooms. This paper reports on the first semester-long introductory CS course based on CSDTs, which was piloted with 51 high school students during the 2017-2018 school year. The goal of this study was to examine if a culturally responsive computing curriculum could teach computer science principles and improve student engagement. Pre-post tests, field notes, weekly teacher meetings, formative assessments, and teacher and student interviews were analyzed to assess successes and failures during implementation. The results indicate students learned the conceptual material in 6 months rather than in the 9 months previously required by the teacher. Students were also able to apply these concepts afterward when programming in Python, implying knowledge transfer. However, student opinions about culture and computing didn't improve, and student engagement was below initial expectations. Thus we explore some of the many challenges: keeping a fully integrated cultural curriculum while satisfying CS standards, maintaining student engagement, and building student agency and self-regulation. We end with a brief description for how we intend to address some of these challenges in the second iteration of this program, scheduled for fall 2018. After which a study is planned to compare this curriculum to others.
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Impact of Engineering Course Participation on Students’ Attitudinal Factors: A Replication Study (Evaluation)
Engineering education, with its focus on design and problem solving, has been shown to be fertile ground for encouraging students’ further development of their fundamental math and science skills in a way that they find relevant and engaging, and for promoting interest in STEM more broadly. To capitalize on these positive aspects of the engineering context, researchers developed, implemented, and studied a three-year engineering curriculum for grades 6 – 8 that utilizes the engineering design process and problem-based learning. In this semester-long elective course, students work through a series of design challenges within a given context (a carnival, airplanes and flight, and robotics, respectively, for 6th, 7th and 8th grades) and learn engineering content as well as practice fundamental math and science skills. This curriculum was developed and researched as part of an earlier project; in that work, course participation was linked with increased academic achievement on state-wide math and science assessments as well as heightened cognitive and behavioral engagement in STEM and science interest [1]. The current work seeks to replicate the findings of this earlier study in a different and larger school district while a) expanding the research foci to include teacher training and teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and b) refining the curriculum materials including the teacher website and support materials. In this paper, we present the research strand focusing on the impact of the course on students’ attitudinal factors including engagement, science interest, and science and math anxiety. These factors were measured in each semester-long course using a pre-post survey design. Survey items are primarily from validated instruments and are similar to those used in prior research on this curriculum and its impact on students; prior research demonstrated good reliability, with alpha values ranging from 0.84 to 0.91 for each construct [1]. We compare students’ levels of engagement, science interest, and math and science anxiety at the pre and post time points to understand whether and how participating in the course influences their standing on these variables. . Open-ended survey items were used as a supplementary data source. The preliminary results from the first year of implementation (2022-2023 academic year) suggest that similar to the original study, there is an increase across some of the student constructs, including student engagement. This finding was also supported by engineering teachers’ input about student engagement in the classroom. As the study progresses into its planned 2nd and 3rd years of curriculum implementation, we will be able to further discern the extent to which multiple years of course enrollment might differentially impact the attitudinal factors of interest (i.e., dosage effects).
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- Award ID(s):
- 2101441
- PAR ID:
- 10535428
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Conferences
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Portland, Oregon
- 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/10.18260/1-2--47556
