Next Door to Silicon Valley: A Researcher-Practitioner Partnership to Address Disparities in Access and Expectations for Computer Science Education

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There is great disparity for students from low socioeconomic households, Latino/a students, and female students to have quality opportunities to learn computer science (CS) or practice computational thinking (CT). This project seeks to advance knowledge of how to build research-practice partnerships that can broaden participation in computing in K-8. This project is a collaboration between Education, Training, Research (ETR), Santa Cruz City Schools (SCCS), and the Santa Cruz Education Foundation (SCEF). The school district is in a unique position, sandwiched between Silicon Valley where many family members of the students, teachers, and staff work in the high-tech industry, and the agricultural communities in the southern part of the county where the main town is 81% Latino/a, 39% are foreign-born, and almost half of the adults have not graduated from high school. The findings will address important questions about what kinds of supports different children need to learn CS, as well as who benefits from CS instruction, and how. The results will fill gaps in understanding how to create systems change in schools and school districts that can lead to CS integration for all students. These gaps include the process through which prioritization and integration occurs in districts and the kinds of support and resources that are needed for teachers. The findings will also contribute to an understanding of how to reduce unconscious bias about who is interested in and would be good at computer science. Finally, the activities will fill an important gap in understanding how to engage parents at all socioeconomic levels in educational reform. This project will produce instructional materials designed to build on the interests and strengths of girls, Hispanic/Latino students, and English language learners in elementary and middle school. The activities will offer opportunities to learn CS and CT, and will build the capacity of educators to test and revise strategies to integrate CS into classrooms in a way that fully engages a range of learners. The activities are also designed to leverage community resources and increase public engagement, with a focus on parents who are traditionally not involved in education reform, in CS education for all students. The project will address a high-level research question: How do we reduce the disparity in students' access to quality opportunities to learn CS/CT and ongoing support to persist in CS? The activities will include teacher professional development, the creation of instructional materials and brief interventions to integrate inclusive CS into elementary and middle school classrooms, a district wide CS committee to identify needs and resources to build a network of support to boost the capacity of all schools to integrate CS into classes, the development of a system to leverage parent and community resources to support and sustain CS education, and data collection and analysis to monitor learning progressions and systems change in order to strengthen the efforts to build a CS pathway for all students. The research methods will involve working in a researcher-practitioner partnership to finalize measures, collect qualitative and quantitative data, and interpret the findings and use them in an iterative process to inform next steps. Outcomes to be measured include teachers' CS capacity and behavior, students' CS knowledge and interest, teachers' and parents' unconscious bias, a networked improvement community to leverage resources and provide support, parent and community engagement, data- and research-driven decision making, and a contribution to the field of broadening participation in CS. An external advisor will monitor the project's Theory of Change, the integrity of the research design and methods, and the development of the research-practice partnership.