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The current in-situ, descriptive case study explored in-service teachers’ contributions and perspectives in the participatory design of an educational game for enhancing middle school students’ computational thinking skills. The informant design technique was adopted, involving specific stakeholders at the stage of conceptualization. Data were collected from 8 in-service teachers at 9 middle schools through observation, a series of individual interviews, and focus-group interviews. The study results indicated that in-service teachers made contributions to the content design at the stage of conceptualization. 

Computational thinking is acknowledged as a fundamental and essential competency that everyone needs to learn for the future. Game-based learning could be a potential platform for improving students’ computational thinking competency with respect to its unique features. However, prior research studies in the field of using games to improve computational thinking draw predominant attention to programming concepts and skills which are fundamental skills of computer science than developing computational thinking competency which students can use across the interdisciplinary. Therefore, the current study investigated how curriculum-oriented game-based learning impacted middle school students’ learning processes, particularly on the development of students’ computational thinking competency, self-efficacy toward computational thinking, and learning engagement in terms of their grade, gender, and prior gaming experience. 

This paper reports on activities and outcomes from years three and four of a 5-year NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (S-STEM) award at a two-year college. The college is a minority-serving institution located in a metro area with high rates of concentrated poverty and low levels of educational attainment. Through the program scholarships are awarded to cohorts of students majoring in engineering selected each fall semester from applications collected the previous spring. After completing transfer preparation curriculum at the two-year college, select scholars who transfer to the local four-year university may remain in the program for continued support. Students in each cohort, including those who remain in the program after transfer, are supported with annual scholarships of up to $6000, depending on financial need. In addition to scholarship money, students participate in a variety of program activities throughout the school year in the form of academic seminars, extracurricular events, professional development, faculty mentoring, peer mentoring, academic advising, and undergraduate research opportunities. Noteworthy elements of the program in years three and four include 1) the selection and award of the fourth and final cohort entering the program, 2) a transition of leadership to a new principal investigator for the program at the two-college, and 3) the increase in number of students who have continued with the program after transfer to the local four-year university. During year three of this five-year program, the first cohort of students successfully transferred and completed a full year at their new four-year university. Supplemental funding has enabled the program to expand support for additional students at both the two-year college and the four-year university after transfer. This has reduced financial burdens and addressed the unanticipated challenge that some students would need more than two years to transfer due to delays brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Program evaluation findings identified requests from students that would enhance the program approach and further prepare for transfer. These included establishing a transferred student panel for students preparing to transfer, seminars on maintaining a positive work/life balance and differences in university systems, further support for peer mentorship for both mentors and mentees, and additional opportunities for collaboration across engineering disciplines. Research findings from interviews conducted with transferred students identified several opportunities to further enhance the transfer preparation approach and support structures needed for success at their new institution. These include intentional preparation for establishing membership in a new community, identification of systems and processes for support at their new institution, including how these may differ from their previous institution, and opportunity to serve as a mentor and engage with students preparing to transfer. In addition, in year 4 program leadership transitioned due to a new role at new university and more students support requests of leadership at both the two-year college and the four-year transfer university than originally anticipated. This has resulted in reflection on the program administration and the people and structures that sustain it. This poster will include summaries of scholar activities, transition in and impact on program leadership, program evaluation results, and research findings from the first cohort of students that have transferred and completed a full year at their new institution. 

This session will highlight innovations in assessing K-12 computational thinking (CT). As an emerging construct, the definition of CT is generally characterized as the thinking processes involved in formulating problems and their solutions in a form that can be effectively carried out by an information-processing agent (Wing, 2006). The thinking skills involved in this process include abstraction, decomposition, evaluation, pattern recognition, logic, and algorithm design (Grover & Pea, 2017). This session brings together researchers representing four innovative approaches to assessing CT, each of which provides teachers with useful information to guide instruction. Each presentation will describe the operational definition of CT for the assessment, development and validation work, and how teachers use assessment results to guide K-12 instruction. 

This descriptive study attended to the extent to which we see evidence of the presence of four practices that promote equity and access in 141 grades 3-8 mathematics lessons in the United States. We found that lessons generally showed evidence of some incorporation of the practices but often not at the highest level. Teachers in this sample engaged in social coaching at a relatively high level, across elementary and middle school classrooms. Teachers tended to do less with respect to supporting connection and engagement between student context and the math learning environment. We also found statistically significant differences between elementary and middle school lessons in positioning students as competent and supporting a nurturing environment by proactively building relationships and productive classroom culture. We offer possible interpretations and a few brief implications of these findings. 

This study examines the utilization of cognitive interviews longitudinally over a one-year period to collectively trace raters’ response processes as they interpreted and scored with observational rubrics designed to measure teaching practices that promote equity and access in elementary and middle school mathematics classrooms. We draw on four rounds of cognitive interviews (totaling 14 interviews) that involved four raters at purposeful time points spread over the year. Findings reported in this study focus on raters’ responses about one rubric, positioning students as competent. The findings point to the complexities of utilizing observational rubrics and the need to track response processes longitudinally at multiple time points during data collection in order to attend to rater calibration and the reliability and validity of resulting rubric scores. 

https://peer.asee.org/37700