CAREER: Advancing Technological Fluency of Underrepresented Youth and their Teachers through Project-Based Learning Opportunities

这项为期五年的研究计划旨在促进我们对如何有效地吸引不同群体的青年学习核心IT概念的方式，激励他们在未来的教育中继续学习的理解。基础研究和设计导向研究将分三个相互关联的阶段进行。 第一阶段的重点是扩大我们对学生使用新技术的机会、兴趣和经验的了解，重点是确定公平的障碍和揭示学习资源。将对加州硅谷地区不同社会经济阶层的大量学生进行调查和访谈，以调查他们获得各种学习机会的机会和兴趣。这项研究将记录创造性学习机会如何在不同社区分布，以及它们对学生兴趣的影响。 它还将有助于定义不同的学生流畅性的配置文件，以及这些是如何与学习生态由自我，家庭，同龄人群体，学校和社区交织的背景构成。 第二阶段的工作将侧重于与教师共同开发课程。这些课程的核心指导原则将主要关注学生作为设计师，学习目标将是帮助学生理解设计作为一个每个人都可以参与的人类过程。 课程材料将在学生设计，编程和实施解决青年兴趣问题的信息系统的项目背景下建立流畅性。这种方法将使学生成为知识和过程的真正贡献者，同时建立对NRC流畅度报告中概述的核心概念和能力的理解，如编程，信息设计和人机交互。在第三阶段，将系统地研究这些课程的教学过程，特别侧重于协同设计工作。本研究的一个主要目的是为合作学习理论做出贡献。将确定富有成效的协作设计实践，并阐明这种协作往往不那么富有成效，但可以提高生产力的方式。协作技术设计工作的认知成果以外的学习属性将被确定为实证研究，包括动机，关系和元交际的结果。除了与当地教师密集共同开发课程外，该项目的教育部分还将包括创建一个视频案例研究库，突出显示生产力较高和较低的小组协作互动的范例。 这些将被用来帮助教师（包括职前和在职教师）和新的研究人员看到如何让学生参与学习，支持流利和提高兴趣和能力，广泛使用和理解技术。视频案例的使用将支持关于教学和学习过程的对话，因为它们提供了可以从多个角度重新审视和反思的具体参考。 录像案例将用于改进现有课程，并用于针对更广泛的信息技术教师和研究人员的传播活动。

This five-year research program is designed to advance our understanding of how to effectively engage diverse groups of youth in learning core IT concepts in ways that motivate them to continue learning in their future education. Basic research and design-oriented research will be conducted in three inter-related phases. The first phase will focus on expanding what we know about students' access, interest, and experiences with new technologies-with an emphasis on identifying barriers to equity and revealing learning resources. Survey and interview work will be carried out with a large and diverse group of students across socio-economic strata in California's Silicon Valley region to investigate their access to, and interest in, various kinds of learning opportunities. The research will document how creative learning opportunities are distributed across different communities and their effects on student interests. It will also contribute to defining different profiles of student fluency and how these are associated with learning ecologies constituted by the interweaving contexts of self, family, peer group, school, and community. The second phase of the work will focus on co-developing courses with teachers. A core guiding principle of these courses will be a primary focus on the student as designer and a learning goal will be to help students understand design as a human process in which everyone can be involved. The course material will build fluency in the context of projects in which students design, program, and implement information systems that address issues of youth interest. This approach will allow students to be authentic contributors of knowledge and processes while simultaneously building understanding of the core concepts and capabilities outlined in the NRC Fluency report-such as programming, information design, and human-computer interaction. In the third phase, the teaching and learning processes in these courses will be studied systematically, with a particular focus on collaborative design work. A key goal of this research is to contribute to theories of collaborative learning. Productive collaborative design practices will be identified and the ways that such collaborations are often less than productive and can be made more productive will be articulated. Learning properties of collaborative technology design work beyond cognitive outcomes will be identified for empirical study, including motivational, relational, and meta-communicative outcomes. Beyond the intensive co-development of courses with local teachers, the educational component of this project will include the creation of a library of video case studies that highlight exemplars of more and less productive small group collaborative interaction. These will be used to help teachers (both pre-service and in-service) and novice researchers see ways of engaging students in learning that support fluency and increase interest and the ability to use and understand technology broadly. The use of video cases will support conversations about teaching and learning processes as they provide concrete references that can be revisited and reflected on from multiple perspectives. The video cases will be used to improve existing courses and in dissemination activities directed at the broader community of information technology teachers and researchers.