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The computer science education (CSEd) community de- mands researchers, curriculum developers, schools of education, and districts take action to meet the needs of all students. This experience report from the CSforALL Broadening Participation in Computing Alliance (BPC- A) describes a Field Catalyst approach to systems change at scale. We further describe how the alliance will cat- alyze the field toward action supporting girls and Black and Hispanic students. By strengthening a shared iden- tity, establishing standards of practice, disseminating a knowledge base, supporting leadership and grassroots efforts and offering frameworks to support policy for equity, the field will catalyze efforts to implement state policies for CSEd 

The demand to provide high-quality computer science (CS) education to K-12 students across the United States continues to grow due to societal transformations driven by AI and cybersecurity. However, the impact of state initiatives and mandates on district leaders’ decision making remains an under-explored area in the literature. In 2022, CSforALL began work in Tennessee, a state poised to enact CS education policy, as part of a Research Practice Partnership (RPP). This study investigates the first eight school districts who participated in the Strategic CSforALL Resource and Implementation Planning Tool (SCRIPT) workshops in 2022 and 2023, setting goals based on the SCRIPT rubric. The study takes a general qualitative approach underpinned by the Capacity, Access, Participation, and Experience (CAPE) Framework [14] to develop a coding scheme analyzing the districts’ related rubric scores and goals, and to investigate the impacts on equity indicators. The districts participated in three SCRIPT workshops held in 2022 and 2023, and this study dives deeply into the initial goals as well as analyzing the ways the SCRIPT rubric aligned to the CAPE Framework to investigate how district leaders make decisions which impact teacher and student outcomes which lead to equitable high-quality CS education. 

Within K-12 computing education, the building blocks that contribute to student success and equitable outcomes are broadly captured in the CAPE framework (i.e., capacity, access, participation, experience). However, these broad com- ponents provide limited detail on the important factors that can support academic achievement, particularly within each component. Our research question for this study was: What are factors comprising each component of CAPE that support academic achievement among K-12 CS students?To answer this question, we first created an a priori set of factors based on previous research findings that have been found to contribute to academic achievement. After organizing these factors within each CAPE component, we conducted a systematic mapping review of K-12 CS education research (2019-2021) (n = 196) from publicly available peer-reviewed articles from the K-12 CS Education Research Resource Center. Through this mapping, we identified an additional set of factors that have been studied by CS education researchers and added these to our set of factors. More importantly, we found that capacity was the component investigated the most frequently and access was the least. There are many areas (or categories) within each component that remain unstudied (i.e., dual credit offerings, career guidance), even though they play a role in computing education. The expanded CAPE framework is now publicly available and can be used to inform researchers and practitioners about what each CAPE component comprises. These factors are accompanied by descriptions of each factor. Not only does it highlight the many factors to be considered when designing and delivering computing education to K-12 students, it also provides a solid framework for future research that synthesizes or analyzes homogeneous factors or explores how various factors may be correlated. 

Research Problem. Computer science (CS) education researchers conducting studies that target high school students have likely seen their studies impacted by COVID-19. Interpreting research findings impacted by COVID-19 presents unique challenges that will require a deeper understanding as to how the pandemic has affected underserved and underrepresented students studying or unable to study computing. Research Question. Our research question for this study was: In what ways has the high school computer science educational ecosystem for students been impacted by COVID-19, particularly when comparing schools based on relative socioeconomic status of a majority of students? Methodology. We used an exploratory sequential mixed methods study to understand the types of impacts high school CS educators have seen in their practice over the past year using the CAPE theoretical dissaggregation framework to measure schools’ Capacity to offer CS, student Access to CS education, student Participation in CS, and Experiences of students taking CS. Data Collection Procedure. We developed an instrument to collect qualitative data from open-ended questions, then collected data from CS high school educators (n = 21) and coded them across CAPE. We used the codes to create a quantitative instrument. We collected data from a wider set of CS high school educators ( n = 185), analyzed the data, and considered how these findings shape research conducted over the last year. Findings. Overall, practitioner perspectives revealed that capacity for CS Funding, Policy & Curriculum in both types of schools grew during the pandemic, while the capacity to offer physical and human resources decreased. While access to extracurricular activities decreased, there was still a significant increase in the number of CS courses offered. Fewer girls took CS courses and attendance decreased. Student learning and engagement in CS courses were significantly impacted, while other noncognitive factors like interest in CS and relevance of technology saw increases. Practitioner perspectives also indicated that schools serving students from lower-income families had 1) a greater decrease in the number of students who received information about CS/CTE pathways; 2) a greater decrease in the number of girls enrolled in CS classes; 3) a greater decrease in the number of students receiving college credit for dual-credit CS courses; 4) a greater decrease in student attendance; and 5) a greater decrease in the number of students interested in taking additional CS courses. On the flip-side, schools serving students from higher income families had significantly higher increases in the number of students interested in taking additional CS courses. 

In 2017 a project was started to form a connected community of practice (CCOP) of projects funded to conduct computer science education research through a research practice partnership methodology. In this poster, organizers from that CCOP detail strategies to encourage ongoing exchange and collaboration in the community of researchers. Strategies began with offering resources broadly useful to all projects in an early phase of their RPP work. Over time, through surveying participants, a more theme-based strategy to appeal to subsets of the community was employed. The poster explores the themes used in the third year of the project and share attendance and engagement data. Generalizable recommendations for encouraging shared data gathering goals and resource curation are offered for similar communities of practice devoted to researching computer science education, and ideas on how organizers can measure the success of such communities are shared. 

Collective impact is an approach for solving complex social problems at scale. The challenge of broadening participation in computing (BPC) is one such problem. The complexity of BPC is compounded by the decentralized nature of public education, where decisions are made primarily at the state level and subject to interpretation at the district level. As such, diversifying computer science (CS) pathways across the nation requires a systemic approach such as collective impact to engage all of the stakeholders who influence CS education and whose decisions can either facilitate or hinder BPC efforts. This experience report discusses how the collective impact framework has been used to advance the work of the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance, an NSF funded BPC Alliance focused on states and state policy as the unit of change. We discuss how the five essential features of collective impact (common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support) coalesce to facilitate ECEP's theory of change. The report highlights specific policy changes that ECEP states have addressed to promote BPC, the flipped accountability that results from a non-hierarchical leadership model, and the challenges of measuring systemic changes as an intermediary to BPC.