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 theStrategic 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 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.

Research Problem. The CAPE Framework has been used in multiple studies to situate capacity-building efforts within schools to offer equitable student access to and participation in K-12 computer science (CS) education. CAPE defines four major components of capacity, access, participation and experience. However, to define what each of the CAPE components can entail, well-defined subcomponents are needed.

Motivation. There are countless factors that contribute to academic achievement [3, 6, 7, 8]. For K-12 computer science (CS) education, these building blocks of student success are broadly captured in the four components of the CAPE framework, which considers the capacity for, access to, participation in, and experiences of students learning CS through a lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion [4]. However, there is currently little published research that identifies factors within each component that influence the education ecosystem that students rely on to participate and have positive learning experiences in CS [10].

In this special session, we present tools and resources created from educational theory to make teaching and scholarship easier and more effective. Included in these resources are CS Teachers Association, CSforAll, CS Teaching Tips, CT Pathways Toolkit, EngageCSEdu, CS Assessments Hub, Cybersecurity, and CS Ed Research Resource Center. These tools/resources provide assistance at the district and school level (administrators, curriculum designers), classroom level (teachers), and researcher/evaluator level. In addition to these overviews, we will provide information on where to find them and will leave ample time for questions from attendees.

Computer science education has witnessed an explosion in curriculum options available for K12 teachers and students to engage with in the last 5 years. At the same time, a team of community members worked for a year to produce the K-12 CS Framework, a list of grade-appropriate CS concepts for inclusion in the academic preparation of all students in grades K-12 in the United States. With a rapidly expanding content pool, the CS Education community must be able to identify gaps in content provided to achieve high quality. In this poster we present a landscape of curriculum from the CSforALL curriculum portal and the relative alignments to concepts and grade bands given in the K-12 CS Framework. Through discussion of these data we hope to highlight areas where future curriculum may be needed, and where current curriculum offerings have focused. Data presented in this poster will look at curricula concentrations both by grade band, and by framework concept area including computing systems, networks and the internet, data and analysis, algorithms and programming, and impacts of computing.

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.

In recent years, state members of the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance have made efforts to increase access to and broaden participation in computing at the K-12 levels. Each ECEP state's K-12 computer science (CS) education journey has been documented during their ECEP membership resulting in over 25,000 digital documents. Over the course of the project it was necessary to track key events, identify trends across states, and maintain consumable records of state progress. A systematic way to collect and track the data is critical to conduct historical and cross-state analyses. In an effort to quantify and categorize, the researchers engaged in a review process of all ECEP reports, artifacts, and other relevant data to develop a system. Relevant and important components were identified in each type of document and assigned codes using ECEP's Five Stage Model ("a five-step process toward state-level CS education reform"), the Capacity, Access, Participation, and Experience (CAPE) framework (to measure equity in CS education implementation), and specific policies initiatives (alignment with various policy initiatives - Code.org's "Nine Policy Ideas to Make CS Fundamental to K?12 Education"). Indiana was identified as a state to conduct an initial, in-depth case study using this process. Indiana's case will be used as a model to further develop the stories of other ECEP Alliance member states. Through the development of a data dashboard, we hope to organize all of this information to make it more easily accessible for review and further analysis. The ECEP data dashboard development is currently in progress.

In summer 2020, the United States Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) piloted a Cyber Academy to teach cybersecurity skills and career awareness to high school JROTC cadets. Modeled after the Air Force JROTC Flight Academy, a collaborative effort between the aerospace industry and Air Force to address a national pilot shortage and increase diversity in the field, the Academy lasted 8 weeks and a diverse group of 25 cadets from 12 states participated. The Academy was led by instructors from three institutions, Moraine Valley Community College, Brookdale Community College and Madison Area College. In this experience report, we provide an overview of the curriculum and student learning ecosystem, including the shift from an in-person experience to online due to COVID-19. We present some preliminary findings based on cadets' feedback, grades, and self-efficacy. Despite being an online course that met 3-5 hours per day for 8 weeks, course retention was 96%. Although girls showed much lower cyber threat identification self-efficacy prior to the start of the course than the boys, they reported the same level of self-efficacy as the boys had post-course. We also share lessons learned from the pilot program and future plans for creating a distributed model of the Academy.

The CS-Ed Podcast's theme for season 2 is "Where should we go from here?" Three of the episodes focused on equity. This panel consists of all the podcast guests that spoke on this topic and the podcast host will serve as the moderator. In their episode, each panelist focused on a different aspect of equity, including cultural competence, supporting students of color, and how to make computer science education an integral and sustained part of learning through systemic change. This panel will be a conversation on equity by having the guests react to each other's episodes and to questions from the audience.

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.

SCRIPT (Strategic CSforALL Resource and Implementation Planning Tool) is a tool and a process created by CSforALL to catalyze systems change by offering a framework to plan and implement Computer Science Education for all students at a local education authority (LEA) or school district level. CSforALL shared this tool with LEAs through guided Workshops, which proved that SCRIPT's Theory of Change was effective. Due to the high demand from school districts all around the US, and motivated by the goal of reaching ALL students, CSforALL tested three different models of scaling the SCRIPT intervention. This poster summarizes our preliminary findings related to the challenges and opportunities presented by each of these three scaling strategies.

Computer science education exists within a broader education environment than individual classrooms. Formal, or during the school day, K-12 education requires implementation within schools and local education agencies with leadership structures, budgets, and often competing priorities. In this experience report we share outcomes from a series of district workshops for supporting critical systems planning needed to ensure the integration and sustainability of computer science education within K-12 systems. The paper will briefly discuss the program's theory of change, the actions CSforALL took to deliver the program at scale, and data with short and long term outcomes from program implementation. Discussion will include the intersection of program and curricular and professional development and the critical frame of continuous improvement as a theoretical model for sustainability and rigor in computer science education implementation.

Computer science education research has primarily focused on teacher and student outcomes. Both teachers and students move through educational systems that have both direct and indirect effects on equity, quality, and implementation. Prior research has shown that there is a gap in enthusiasm and perception of importance of CS education between teachers and school leadership [2]. Additionally, many CS education studies have reported teacher attrition after professional development due to institutional barriers [3,4]. The recent report released by Google [2] mentions implementation 34 times and highlights the barriers faced by teachers and students when the systems are not aligned with the goals of individuals.

Computer science education is moving from an elective subject in K-12 schools to a more compulsory topic with a focus on all students. As a new discipline is added to education, we need to explore not only the implications and theory behind student and teacher learning and development, but also the systems change that will happen in organizations in order to produce sustainable CS education. In this paper, we explore theories of systems change, especially in education, and describe the creation of a series of rubrics to help districts self-assess their CS education supports. Early data is presented from a pilot year of workshops with 67 school districts showing a partial landscape of how school districts rate their own strengths and weaknesses and provide a discussion of initial evidence of validity for the rubrics.

No abstract available.

In the summer of 2017, the National Science Foundation funded a cohort of Research Practice Partnership (RPP) projects focused on expanding access to Computer Science Education in the United States. Funded as one of the RPP projects was the RPPforCS project, a collaboration between Sagefox Consulting Group and CSforALL. The project operates as a community of practice for the individual RPP projects, holding regular webinars, producing a newsletter, and curating a discussion forum on Slack. In this special session we propose a structured poster session specifically for the RPP projects funded by the NSF.

Creating equitable, sustainable, and productive partnerships between computer science (CS) education researchers and practitioners is essential if we are to further improve CS educational outcomes, practice, and equity. Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) provide one promising approach for expanding how practice may inform research and research may inform practice. This early work, centered around a framework proposed by Henrick et al., and utilizing interview data from 11 participants, explores the ways in which six diverse RPP teams went about developing trusting and collaborative relationships as they worked together to solve local problems of practice. Barriers and challenges to collaboration and trust building, as well as mechanisms by which teams overcame those challenges, are discussed. The study revealed discrete team behaviors, norms, and structures that may contribute to building more collaborative, trusting, and sustainable RPP relationships. Limitations are presented and implications for current and future RPP teams, as well as possible future research directions, are addressed.

Computer science education is expanding rapidly across the globe. With increased community awareness and engagement in computer science education efforts, universities and researchers no longer make up a clear majority of the landscape of efforts to reach students and teachers. In this paper I use the commitments made to the CSforALL Consortium in the fall of 2017 to infer a participatory landscape of computer science education efforts, and to highlight the benefits of the commitment making model as a case study for international CS education efforts. This paper analyzes both the types of commitments and the potential impact of the commitments on the CS education landscape in the United States using a document analysis approach. Overall, the analysis indicates a growing landscape with a focus on serving students or teachers, and a focus on formal education for implementation.

The SCRIPT, the School CSforALL Resource & Implementation Planning Tool, is a new tool created by the CSforALL Consortium that will serve as a framework and platform to guide CSforALL advocates and district staff in the creation of CSforALL implementation plans that adhere to CSforALL values and reflect the unique needs and goals of any school district. The SCRIPT engages school districts in self reflection, review of examples, and goal setting for 6 areas designed from the literature supporting curriculum adoption and organizational change. These areas include: (1) Leadership, (2) Technology Infrastructure, (3) Teacher Capacity, (4) Curriculum and Materials Selection and Refinement, (5) Partners, and (6) Community. The goal of this workshop is to train any CSforALL advocate to be able to lead a school district in an implementation planning session to create a K-12 district wide computer science education plan, by following the SCRIPT. Based on an extensive needs assessment conducted by the CSforALL Consortium (publication under review), districts require professional development and resources to (1) understand the goals of the CSforALL movement and how it can benefit their students, (2) identify ways to create meaningful K-12 pathways for students, and (3) navigate available resources in order to identify appropriate partners and resources to support the implementation of CS education. The SCRIPT was created to address these needs in a replicable way that could be used at scale by any CSforALL advocate.

The landscape of computer science education curriculum and tools is rapidly expanding. After President Obama made a call to action for Computer Science For All, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has continued to award curriculum writing projects, and recently non-profits and for-profit offerings have expanded. This poster presents a landscape analysis of a subset of the curriculum available for K-12 computer science (CS). The subset is derived from CSforAll Consortium's (www.csforall.org) 208 current members that are classified as content providers, a resource for stakeholders in CS education who are looking to see the breadth of offerings available, or choose a particular curriculum. The landscape presented in this poster is organized by grade band and concept areas as defined by the K-12 CS Education Framework. In this poster, we will describe a methodology for categorizing the content providers, evaluate whether they have available curriculum for review, and provide summary landscape statistics about the alignment between the content reviewed and the K12 CS Framework.[1] This will enable us to demonstrate both the breadth of CS content areas available in curriculum for stakeholders in CS, as well as the areas in which curriculum is not widely available.

Over the last few years, a number of repositories of information relevant to the computing education community have come online, each with different content and purpose. In this special session, we present an overview of these repositories and the content that each provides. Demonstrations of the functionality of the repositories will be shown and attendees are encouraged to come with their questions and suggestions for improvement if they are currently users of the repositories.

In the US, many groups of students are underrepresented in computer science (CS) classes at the K-12 level [23,25]. Many of the activities of TEALS (Technology Education and Literacy in Schools), a national computer science education program, have the potential to impact the diversity of students enrolled in computer science classes, student performance on AP exams, and student attitudes towards CS careers. TEALS works with high schools to build and grow sustainable computer science programs through teaching partnerships between classroom teachers and volunteers who work in the tech industry. In 2016, TEALS initiated a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Working Group (DEIWG) to holistically address the overall impact of the program on increasing diversity in CS, including TEALS' approach to: selection of schools, student recruitment efforts into CS courses, recruitment and training of TEALS volunteers, curriculum design and resources, and instructional support of volunteers and teachers. The working group compared national, regional, and state-wide outcomes and demographics to those of TEALS partner schools, students, volunteers, and teachers to identify best practices and areas in need of investment. This paper describes these findings and presents strategies for future work.

The rapid expansion of the Computer Science for All (CSforAll) movement in the United States has catalyzed promising policies, tools, and pedagogies for K-12 universal CS education. It has also created significant challenges for schools and districts, namely, decision-making around the programs, curricula, and professional development that will best align to their communities' broader visions and goals around equitable computing education for all.

Computer Science Education is rapidly expanding in the United States[5]. As a part of this expansion, many programs are using university students and industry volunteers for a variety of purposes within schools. These volunteers can bring a wealth of content knowledge and professional experience in their interactions with students [3], and can be inspirational when talking about the problems they work on[1]. Some programs even advocate for the use of professionals for instruction based upon their content knowledge[2]. Although professionals often have a high level of content knowledge, they may lack the training or experience necessary to be effective in the classroom[3, 4]. This panel brings together 4 different organizations with experience working with content expert volunteers with widely disparate preparation in teaching.

K12 CS education is expanding at an unprecedented scale throughout communities nationwide. Throughout research on CS education and education more broadly, the disconnect between research and practice, or research and implementation, is well documented. To enhance its relevance to and for practice, research should build on existing knowledge and account for local contexts, and the engagement of research and researchers should be coordinated to facilitate their connection to practice. In offering this session at SIGCSE, we likely will move away from "local contexts" to larger issues; research priorities, however, often are shaped by external, funding priorities and RFPs. The knowledge forum format will allow the community to engage in a process of setting its own agenda which can later be aligned to funding opportunities. Prioritizing topics and questions for research and implementation in ways that are rooted in the needs of instruction and that draw on collective expertise is increasingly important. The proposed special session addresses this issue through a systematic and tested prioritization format. Specific objectives of the proposed session will be to: (1) introduce the topic prioritization format to participants; (2) demonstrate how the format can be used to identify and to organize research priorities among a group of experts; (3) implement the format with members of the SIGSCE community; (4) plant the seeds for potential collaborations; (5) and solicit feedback from the SIGSCE community on how to improve the format.

Computer science (CS) education initiatives often use measures of interest to assess outcomes. Although appropriate for initiatives meant to encourage future participation, these measures do not always align with the complex nature of interest as described by the learning sciences literature or recognize the reality that school-related initiatives aimed at student engagement in CS will not produce individual interest in every student. In this paper, we present a review of the interest literature, and data from a survey with evidence of validity of over 1,500 students in various CS courses in New York City. By using Latent Class Analysis (LCA), we identify five different statistically significant subgroups of CS students: Enthusiasts, Engaged, Bookish, Idlers, and Disinterested. Our findings suggest that while some students enjoy CS in class and feel the teacher is pedagogically effective, they may not develop the individual interest characterized by seeking additional learning opportunities outside of class.

Many states are taking up the President's challenge to provide CS for All. One of the most significant barriers to realizing this goal is the lack of trained and certified CS teachers. Building teacher capacity on a large scale is a challenge each of these panelists has tackled in their own region. Panelists will discuss the pros and cons of targeting in-service vs. pre-service teachers, online vs. face-to-face training, carrots vs. sticks, top down vs. bottom up strategies, and long-term vs. short term solutions to building capacity across an entire state or metropolitan area. Panelists represent CS for All efforts from Texas, New York City, and Arkansas.

The rapid expansion of computer science (CS) education across the United States has left schools struggling to find teachers for CS classrooms. One approach to supplementing school and teacher expertise is to use industry professionals as volunteers in the classroom. This paper outlines the model of recruiting, training, and supporting volunteers in CS classrooms used by TEALS, a national computer science education program that creates co-teaching partnerships between industry experts and educators. This paper presents detailed information about the volunteers and the training the they receive, as well as the impact and outcomes on the students and cooperating teachers. Results from teacher, student, and volunteer surveys show satisfaction with the volunteers, as well as continued growth in perceived volunteer classroom performance over the year.

Computer science is rapidly expanding across the United States, and as schools look for guidance about what constitutes developmentally appropriate topics, state education departments are looking for assistance in the creation of standards. The K--12 Computer Science (CS) Framework was developed to fit these needs. The framework is the first of its kind in the K--12 CS domain, filling a much-needed structural and definitional role in the field. The framework was created as part of a collaboration at multiple levels within the CS community across the United States. Following the footsteps of other disciplines, this framework provides definitions and guidelines on what students should know (concepts) and be able to do (practices) within certain grade bands in today's computing classrooms. This paper details why the framework was developed, how it was designed, and what impacts it could have on the future of K--12 computing education.

Rising demand for high school computer science courses in the United States has created pressure to increase the number of computer science(CS) teachers in a short amount of time[3]. In this experience report, we present the TEALS program as a unique, high-touch, professional development model, pairing computing industry professionals with classroom teachers. By combining the relative strengths of the team (content and pedagogy) TEALS has been able to successfully train new CS teachers. We present the history of the TEALS program, the volunteer and teacher recruitment process, the volunteer training program, data from a study of the pedagogical content knowledge of the TEALS volunteers, and program growth and efficacy data. Additionally, we offer achievement of students on the AP CS A exam as an externally valid measurement of learning outcomes in TEALS classrooms.

One of the critical barriers to increasing pre-collegiate computer science course offerings in the U.S. is a lack of qualified computer science teachers. Programs such as TEALS, a teacher preparation program pairing high school teachers with computing professionals to offer CS courses, provide opportunities for in-service teachers to gain experience teaching computer science. However, it is not clear whether the high school teachers develop sufficient pedagogical expertise to sustain high-quality computer science course offerings at their schools. Furthermore, the field of computer science education lacks valid and reliable ways of measuring pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), a construct that describes the knowledge teachers need for effective instruction. In this poster, the authors present these results from the first year of a three-year NSF grant to study how TEALS participation influences novice computer science teachers' PCK: 1) a theoretical framework describing the critical components of CS PCK, 2) the results of the first field test of a CS PCK assessment, including the psychometric properties of the assessment, and 3) a comparison of how teachers performed on the assessment at the beginning and end of their first year of computer science teaching and how they performed relative to their computing professional mentors.

Novices struggle with the implementation of algorithms in code. Assessments asking students to describe algorithms in code have shown that use of abstractions in the descriptions have correlated with students' ability to produce algorithms in code. In this study, 24 introductory computer science students were asked to think out loud while writing code involving simple array algorithms in an online system. Student statements were classified based on the level of abstraction used in the statement. An analysis of the statements revealed that students with greater proficiency at writing code were more likely to use multiple levels of abstraction when describing the code they were writing, and moved between levels with higher frequency than less proficient students. The results align with self explanation research and provide insight into the cognitive mechanisms responsible for the transfer between the skills of reading and writing code.

Code comprehension problems have been shown to be effective assessment items in computer science education. In this paper we present qualitative and quantitative results of a study evaluating the effectiveness of code comprehension questions with feedback as learning events. Students taking an introductory programming course that satisfies a university requirement interacted with an online tutoring system using code comprehension problems about simple array algorithms as a part of a homework assignment. Students answered the problems in their own words first, before selecting a multiple choice option from the system.

With grant funding from the National Science Foundation, we are developing the CodeTrainer Content Authoring System, a mechanism that allows educators to create and contribute their own curriculum content and align that content with the features of our larger intelligent tutoring system, CodeTrainer. Through a series of user studies, we evaluated the needs of computer science educators for both curriculum content and appropriate user interface. Results from these studies indicate that computer science educators would find CodeTrainer a useful tool, and offered suggestions for improving the usability. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1113692.

Students' ability to reason and abstract about code is an important factor in the development of their expertise in producing code. The literature has primary focused on the correlation between measures of students' ability to abstract about code and other skills. The studies and proposed work in my thesis take a mixed methods approach to understanding the impact of feedback regarding algorithmic abstraction and application of contextual scaffolding to problems on the learner.

While many computer science students plan to pursue careers as software engineers, research shows that most traditional undergraduate CS programs fail to prepare students for the realities of programming in industry. Many misconceptions that are interfering with the transition to industry are belief-oriented, not skill-oriented, in nature, so traditional misconception assessments will not yield a deep understanding of them.

No abstract available.

As professional educators we produce a large number of assessments for our students to complete. These assessments or exams are often evaluated informally based upon student feedback and simple measures such as average score on a question. This paper highlights another more rigorous approach to item evaluation, and presents an evaluation of several items from an assessment as examples of the type of information that Item Response Theory can provide.

This paper describes an experiment involving incorporating reading assignments into an introductory programming class at the university level. Results indicate that assignments of this type help students make connections between the concepts they are studying, and computer science in general, with their everyday lives.

Over the past decade, support groups and organizations have become increasingly commonplace in universities and schools. The poster will explore how these groups can unintentionally serve as deterrents for girls interested in pursuing CS.