Computer Science

Empowering Educators to Create Customized, Culturally Responsive Instructional Materials from Scratch Encore Harmonized with the Interest of Students (Collaborative Research: Weintrop)

Principal Investigator:

This poster will present the NSF funded project entitled CAREER: Situating Computational Learning Opportunities in the Digital Lives of High School Students. This project explores ways to use the data that high school students create and consume daily to situate foundational data science ideas.

Click image to preview:
Discipline/Topic:

Developing a Suite of Standards-based Instructionally Supportive Tools for Middle School Computer Science

Principal Investigator:

The ASSIST-MSCS project strives to develop a set of educative resources, formative assessment tools and teacher professional development (PD) to support middle school teachers with their understanding of Computer Science (CS) standards and their ability to use formative assessment tools related to these standards.

Click image to preview:
Discipline/Topic:
Target Audience:

Designing and Researching a Program for Preparing Teachers as Facilitators of Computational Making Activities in Classroom and Informal Learning Environments

Principal Investigator:

In this project, we engaged elementary (grades K-5) pre-service teachers (PSTs) as facilitators in a family technology program called Family Creative Learning, embedded in the Denver Public Library makerspace network. We studied PSTs’ computational thinking and facilitation practices and its impact on children's learning across informal and classroom settings where pre-service teachers concurrently conduct their field work. The project team will develop research-based resources, tools, and activities that help to cultivate these key facilitation practices.

Click image to preview:
Discipline/Topic:
Target Audience:

Assessing College-Ready Computational Thinking (Collaborative Research: Brown)

Principal Investigator:

Wright maps can provide psychometricians with information about validity based on internal structure, by allowing us to look for banding based on score levels across items. We recently interviewed teachers and trainers about the use of these maps, along with learning progressions and sample student responses to find what was more and less useful, and what features should be added. In this presentation, we will discuss these methods and feedback from teachers.

Click image to preview:
Discipline/Topic:
Target Audience:

Opportunities for Research within the Data Science Education Community

This webinar provided early career data science education researchers with information on the state of the field; tools, curricula, and other resources for researchers; and insight into funding opportunities and proposal development. Participants explore topics, research interests, and problems of practice in more depth in breakout rooms with session leaders.

Author/Presenter

Katherine Miller, Chad Dorsey, The Concord Consortium; Kirsten Daehler, Leti Perez, WestEd; Kayla DesPortes, New York University; Nicholas Horton, Amherst College; Seth Jones, Middle Tennessee State University; Josephine Louie, Education Development Center; Josh Rosenberg, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; David Weintrop, University of Maryland

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2023
Short Description

This webinar provided early career data science education researchers with information on the state of the field; tools, curricula, and other resources for researchers; and insight into funding opportunities and proposal development. Participants explore topics, research interests, and problems of practice in more depth in breakout rooms with session leaders.

Design Considerations for a Middle School Computer Science Pedagogical Content Knowledge Instrument

K- 12 Computer Science (CS) education is developing rapidly but still lacks a comprehensive measure for CS teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) . We respond to this need by describing the design of a CS-PCK instrument for ‘Algorithms and Programming’ that measures three broad constructs: (a) teachers’ understanding of standards and standards-alignment, (b) teachers’ formative assessment practices, and (c) teachers’ self-efficacy for teaching and assessing CS.

Author/Presenter

Satabdi Basu

Daisy Rutstein

Carol Tate

Arif Rachmatullah

Hui Yang

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2022
Short Description

K- 12 Computer Science (CS) education is developing rapidly but still lacks a comprehensive measure for CS teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). We respond to this need by describing the design of a CS-PCK instrument for ‘Algorithms and Programming’ that measures three broad constructs: (a) teachers’ understanding of standards and standards-alignment, (b) teachers’ formative assessment practices, and (c) teachers’ self-efficacy for teaching and assessing CS.

Standards-Aligned Instructional Supports to Promote Computer Science Teachers' Pedagogical Content Knowledge

The rapid expansion of K-12 CS education has made it critical to support CS teachers, many of whom are new to teaching CS, with the necessary resources and training to strengthen their understanding of CS concepts and how to effectively teach CS. CS teachers are often tasked with teaching different curricula using different programming languages in different grades or during different school years, and tend to receive different professional development (PD) for each curriculum they are required to teach.

Author/Presenter
Satabdi Basu

Daisy Rutstein

Carol Tate

Arif Rachmatullah

Hui Yang

Lead Organization(s)
Year
2022
Short Description

This position paper advocates supporting CS teacher professional learning by supplementing existing curriculum-specific teacher PD with standards-aligned PD that focuses on teachers' conceptual understanding of CS standards and ability to adapt instruction based on student understanding of concepts underlying the CS standards.