This session focuses on broadening participation for students with disabilities and difficulties through a cross-project discussion around the essential questions of responsiveness and of tackling pervasive deficit models. The presenters find deficit models unacceptable. Learning is framed as a form of adaptation that respects the knowledge students bring to learning environments.

The purpose of this session is to share the recent development, validation, and use of a written assessment geared toward replacing labor- and time-intensive (cognitive) interviews as a means to obtain evidence of students’ mathematical reasoning. Specifically, Ron Tzur first depicts the provisional stage (called participatory), which correlates with Vygotsky’s ZPD, and what it entails for assessment of students’ mathematics.

The crosscutting themes in the NGSS call for forms of thinking that often are contrary to everyday forms of thinking and are not familiar to most students, especially students from underrepresented populations. Within each theme, there are supporting skills and understandings that students must have in order to understand the broader theme. For example, to reason well about cause and effect, students need to know when to attempt to isolate and control for variables and when to look for interactions, multiple contributing causes, and indirect causes.

A program’s effectiveness is judged by whether it produces positive outcomes for participants, with the randomized experiment being the gold standard for determining the efficacy of an intervention. However, there are many ways to evaluate program effectiveness, including design-based and implementation methods. The intervention implemented usually differs—to a greater or lesser degree—from the program that was designed, making it unclear whether unfavorable results are due to an ineffective program model or implementation failure.

Students have traditionally faced difficulties in creating their own computational models due to steep learning curves associated with programming, difficulties in formulating mathematical equations, and lack of student-centered tools to facilitate the use of data from real-world phenomena to inform model design. Addressing these issues will make it possible to broaden participation by engaging students in computational thinking and modeling at younger ages, and by providing a pathway for students who struggle with mathematical formulas and data/graph literacy to participate.

While there is broad consensus about the synergistic relations between STEM domains and CT concepts and practices, there remains much to be done in developing CT-supported STEM curricula and in providing K–12 teachers and practitioners with the tools and resources to implement such curricula. In this 90-minute topical session, leaders from four DRK–12 STEM+C projects that are developing technology-based solutions address challenges in developing appropriate curricula, resources, and assessments for elementary, middle, and high school STEM courses.

This panel tackles “broadening impacts” by featuring studies with new ideas for outreach and dissemination. Dissemination to maximize impact can occur as a new study is launched, during data collection and early phases of interpretation, and when a project is complete and big-picture findings emerge with implications for policy and practice. This panel focuses on how their projects have created dissemination formats to increase the influence of their work for targeted audiences.