Creating Adoptable Computing Education Integrated into Social Studies Classes

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The project aims to provide more students computing education by integrating programming activities into social studies classes and to use the computing to enhance students’ data literacy. Today, few students see computer science in high schools. Even in states with 40% or more of high schools offering a computer science class, less than 5% of students take that opportunity. Every high school student takes history. This project is developing an on-line education research curriculum for data literacy and data visualization tools and providing on-going support to teachers. This project supports students computationally to build data visualizations in history classes, with programming explicitly. This project also tackles the challenge of supporting social studies teachers to adopt the data literacy curriculum and the integrated computing education activities. Over a three-year period, the project is tracking teachers from a pre-service teacher data literacy course, into their field experience, and on into their in-service placement. Over three years, the project will describe the factors that influence adoption and non-adoption. This project is unique in its focus on developing curriculum and technology purpose-built for social studies with teacher involvement to improve adoption. The potential of the project is both to provide computing education to a larger number and more diverse range of students and to provide data literacy in a history context.The project draws on three theoretical frameworks. The Technology Adoption Model suggests that teachers will adopt technology that has high perceived usefulness and high perceived usability. Design-based research informs what data to collect and how to analyze it when conducting a multi-year iterative study. Participatory design informs how to involve teachers in the design process so that the curriculum and technology meets teachers’ perceptions of usefulness and usability. The project takes an iterative approach to developing an on-line education research curriculum for data literacy and data visualization tools and also in the designed support for teachers. The goal of the support to teachers (pre-service and in-service) is both to develop their knowledge and to inform the design of the curriculum and technology so that it can be adapted to increase adoption. This project is supported by the CS for All program.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.