CSforAll: RPP: Pathways for Advancing Computing Education

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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Massachusetts, Boston (UMB) propose Pathways for Advancing Computing Education (PACE), a researcher-practitioner partnership (RPP) organized as a networked improvement community (NIC) facilitated by the MIT Teaching Systems Lab (TSL), the UMB Broadening Advanced Technology Education Connections (BATEC), and including a consortium of 16 diverse school districts across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. PACE participants share the common goal of broadening participation in computing for underserved groups in computer science (CS) in Massachusetts: females, Black and Hispanic/Latinx, low-income students, English learner students and students with disabilities. The long term objectives of the NIC are to (1) refine high school CS curriculum pathways; (2) develop a dashboard of measures for tracking access, achievement, and equity in CS teaching and learning; (3) develop shared professional development experiences around CS equity teaching practices that cut across the different curriculum choices that individual districts will make; and (4) share new models, curricula, and professional development resources widely across the state and across the country. This project will support the first phase of the NIC development.Strengthening CS education across the commonwealth will require creating a diverse set of pathways for different districts--with different curriculum structures, demographic compositions, and per pupil expenditures--to make progress towards helping all students meet and exceed the Massachusetts Digital Literacy and Computer Science standards and close the many opportunity gaps related to CS education that exist throughout the state. PACE-appointed fellows (teachers and administrators from 7-8 pilot districts) will use the Strategic CSforALL Research and Implementation Planning Tool (SCRIPT) to identify challenges and opportunities in their districts. As the challenges are identified, the TSL practice space framework--games and simulations that let teachers rehearse for and reflect upon important decisions in teaching--will be used to support PACE fellows in co-designing strategies and interventions to address problems of practice, working towards developing a prototype district "dashboard" of measures that can be used to track progress towards equity of opportunity and outcomes in CS education across the district. The project will iteratively improve on these initial learning experiences for a second year and map out pathways for expanding the number of districts with PACE fellows. The project will set the stage for a larger request for proposals (RFP) that engages other philanthropic and industry stakeholders engaged in CS education in Massachusetts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.