Are you looking to learn more about developing and executing research plans to best meet the needs of your CS education projects? Utilizing case studies from the evaluation research group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center intermixed with hands-on activities, this workshop will help you along your research or program evaluation journey! As a workshop participant, you will work through guided practice activities in small groups to deepen your understanding of how to design research and evaluation methods for your program. Key takeaways from this tutorial will be the steps and considerations for developing a research or evaluation plan that aligns data collection activities and analysis to your research or evaluation questions. Instrumentation will also be shared throughout, with participants taking away examples of surveys and interview protocols that have been effectively used by the team at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Resources will also be provided on how to find additional instruments and how to assess and repurpose those for your projects. This tutorial will help you determine which data is most critical to collect and which methods are best suited for collecting that data based on your participants and program needs and resources.

There is greater demand for Computer Science (CS) to be taught in elementary education as more states pass policies requiring it. Integrating CS into elementary education provides a viable avenue to teach CS to all students and can result in more equitable outcomes. However, our research demonstrates many elementary educators have concerns about not having enough time, training, knowledge, curricula, resources, and/or support to teach or integrate CS in their general education classrooms. This session will bring together educators, curriculum developers, professional learning providers, researchers, and practitioners interested in fostering CS and computational thinking skills among young learners. Topics will include how CS is currently being taught or integrated into elementary education, reasons why teachers are or are not integrating CS, resources and supports to address barriers to teaching CS, and what is needed to increase the integration of CS in elementary education on larger scales.

Have a CS education research project that needs a survey? If you're an education researcher who wants to learn more about survey instrumentation in order to expedite and improve your research, this session is for you! Come learn how to find, remix, and use existing surveys by delving into the process of taking openly shared resources and repurposing them for your projects. In this workshop, we'll cover basics of survey creation and modification, as well as touch upon some additional useful tips like piloting surveys, how to avoid bots attacking your survey and protecting your participants' privacy. We'll also look at how to choose a survey that fits your needs. You will be actively engaged in hands-on activities. Key takeaways from this workshop will include clear steps you can take to choose an instrument that addresses your research questions and study design, the role that validity and reliability play in instrument design, how to modify an instrument (if needed) to answer your research question, and how to add your instruments to the corpus of instruments at the K-12 CS Education Research Resource Center. Laptop is needed for this workshop.

Students living in rural areas are less likely to attend schools that offer computer science (CS) courses largely because educational institutions in these remote areas lack the resources to staff teaching positions for these courses. This study investigated the impact of WeTeach\_CS, a program designed to train teachers to become certified to teach high school CS in Texas. The WeTeach\_CS collective impact model may be well suited to influence rural areas at scale because it utilizes an existing network of organizations across the state to bring high-quality professional development opportunities to teachers in remote areas. Results from a comparative interrupted time series analysis showed a significant, positive change in the rate in which the number of certified CS teachers in rural areas increased during the period of time after WeTeach\_CS began compared to the period before the program was implemented, whereas the number of teachers certified in technology applications showed no such change. Furthermore, the growth rate in the number of certified CS teachers was much higher for rural schools than urban, suggesting that collective impact models like WeTeach\_CS may be especially beneficial for rural communities.

With the goal of better understanding how to increase the computer science (CS) teacher workforce, this study examined the factors that predict eventual success in achieving teacher certification in CS. Participants (N = 500) were teachers who were certified in other subject areas and who expressed an interest in becoming certified to teach computer science in Texas. Results showed that teachers were more likely to become certified in CS if they already held a certification in another STEM field or if they had some prior knowledge in CS. The extent to which teachers participated in an online professional development course predicted certification success after controlling for prior CS knowledge and other factors whereas the number of hours spent in face-to-face CS professional development did not. These findings have important implications for policy makers and professional development providers who make investments of time and money to grow CS teacher capacity and increase student access to computer science education at the high school level.