Background. The Standards for Computer Science (CS) Teachers include indicators related to classroom practices. To assess teacher proficiency related to these indicators at scale, we created and pilot-tested a vignette-based measure of K-5 CS teacher proficiencies related to Standards 2, 4, and 5.

We designed a one-year coaching program to provide U.S. high school CS teachers with the ongoing support to help shape their professional growth and identity as CS teachers. Our research question for this project was: Does CS coaching facilitate teacher professional growth and identity as a CS teacher? Adopting a mixed-methods approach, our study leveraged pre- and post-program surveys, ongoing coaching logs, and introspective self-reflection checklists to triangulate data from both coaches and coachees. Coachees' rated their professional growth and identity significantly higher after the intervention compared to before, and this difference indicated a large effect. Both before and after intervention, coachees indicated they identified partially as CS teachers, and this sense of identity grew after intervention. The success of this pilot, rooted in effective professional development practices, demonstrates how engaging teachers in coaching can motivate their interest in teaching CS. Professional development providers and regional agencies can replicate and adapt these processes to empower new CS educators.

With over 22 million students enrolled in PreK-5 grades in the United States alone, we recognize that this is an important opportunity to bring computer science (CS) education to millions more students than who have traditionally had access. It also presents a unique opportunity to embrace teaching computer science in these early grades that is highly inclusive, engaging, and even blended with traditional subjects taught in these early years. In this panel, we bring together a collection of experts in the PreK-5 field, including researchers, a curriculum designer, and teachers, to discuss promising practices for including CS instruction in the PreK-5th grades, focusing in particular on PreK-2nd grades. The intended audience for this panel includes researchers and practitioners who are interested in CS in the early elementary and early childhood years. This topic is highly relevant to the SIGCSE community since it brings together teachers, curriculum designers, and researcher perspectives into a shared space to highlight the ways schools, teachers, and researchers can think about successfully adding computer science into young children's education.

Despite their shared goal of improving learner outcomes [6], a persistent gap often exists between practitioners and education researchers. Team building within a Research Practice Partnership (RPP) requires leadership and team members that are not only committed to working together but also have the proper tools to do so. Thus, our research question is, What would an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) reveal about the formation of an RPP against Dimension 1 of the Five Dimensions of Effectiveness Framework? We conducted a series of interviews with RPP members every six months of the course of three years, conducting six sets of interviews in total with participating members of the RPP ranging from n=7 to n=12 participants.

Although there is extensive research on what makes K-12 teacher computer science (CS) professional development (PD) effective, little attention has been given to how PD providers prefer to collect and report data. A platform that met the needs of teachers while also simultaneously meeting the needs of funding bodies could be powerful in answering questions about participation and experiences in CS PD. Our research question for this study was: Which features and types of data do teachers find most important to include in a platform designed to record data related to their engagement with PD? We used an exploratory-sequential mixed methods approach that included focus groups and a survey created from an analysis of the data from the focus groups.