Design, Development, Implementation, and Testing of an Accessible Computational Thinking Curriculum for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders

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The project will 1) determine accessibility issues students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) would face with a computational thinking (CT) curriculum designed for mainstream students, 2) design instructions to make an existing CT curriculum for mainstream students accessible to students with ASD, 3) implement the accessible CT curriculum in one school and the original CT curriculum in another school for students with ASD, and 4) compare the effectiveness of the accessible CT curriculum to the original one to evaluate its success. This will be the first study to design, develop, implement, and evaluate an accessible CT curriculum for students with ASD. It intends to provide a publicly accessible CT curriculum resource with learning objectives, instructional design and information presentation methods, assessments, feedback, learning environments, and professional development materials to teach CT to students with ASD. This project is a collaboration between expert practitioners and researchers working together to accomplish two objectives. The first objective is to identify adaptations and accommodations to make an existing computational thinking (CT) curriculum accessible to students with ASD. This objective will be accomplished by 1) analyzing seventh graders’ characteristics at a school for students with ASD, and 2) developing adaptations and accommodations to make an existing CT curriculum developed for mainstream students accessible to the seventh-grade students. The data to be collected for this objective consists of systematic documentation of the adaptations and accommodations, including learning objectives, instructional design, information presentation, assessments, feedback, and learning environment. The second objective is to implement the accessible CT curriculum at one school and the original one without the adjustments at another school for students with ASD, and test its effectiveness in improving students with ASDs’ learning of CT concepts (CTCs) and increasing their development of fluency in CT practices (CTPs) through two-group repeated measures study. The data to be collected for this objective will include pre- and post-tests to measure students’ learning of CTCs and two artifact-based interviews to measure their development of fluency in CTPs. ANCOVA tests will determine if the accessible CT curriculum was effective in differentiating the two groups on their learning of CTCs and their development of fluency in CTPs. This will be the first study to design, develop, implement, and test an accessible CT curriculum for students with ASD, and will provide the first publicly accessible CT curriculum repository for students with ASD. This project is funded 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.