BPC-AE Collaborative Research: Researching Equity and Antiracist Learning in CS (REAL-CS)

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The University of Oregon, in collaboration with the University of California-Los Angeles, will extend the REAL-CS BPC Alliance to address the historical and current racial and gender disparities in participation in high school computer science education. With a focus on broadening participation for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Pacific Islander students, using a lens of intersectionality, the project's reach into addressing systemic barriers in high school computer science (CS) education will impact thousands of students, teachers, and administrators in US public high schools. REAL-CS will support and sustain the equity-focused and research-based Exploring Computer Science (ECS) program. In collaboration with regional and state partner programs, REAL-CS will prepare 250 ECS teachers per year. The Alliance will also support 32 experienced ECS teachers through advanced professional development and an additional 30 ECS teacher leaders as part of the ECS national facilitator workshop. In total, REAL-CS will reach approximately 20,000 high school students who will have the opportunity to take an equity-focused CS course from highly prepared teachers. Further, a curricular refresh will be shared online and freely available, to be used by an estimated 3,500 current ECS teachers nationwide. Additionally, an administrator guide will be freely available on the project website, and the deep-dive professional development series will train 40 administrators across the US in collaboration with Alliance partners. Finally, research across the teacher, administrator, and student perspectives of this Alliance will not only inform internally-created programs, but also be disseminated across other Alliances and CS projects nationwide to ensure that youth voice and educator experiences inform the creation and implementation of CS initiatives. Overall, the key goal of REAL-CS is to create the necessary conditions and capacity in high schools that lead to equitable participation of students of color in high-quality computer science classes. This BPC Alliance Extension supports a BPC mission to challenge colorblind notions of building capacity in schools through antiracist approaches that disrupt and address systemic racism in high school computer science (CS). Our Extension will deepen the Alliance's programs and scholarship to address systemic inequities in CS education with three key groups of participants central to the high school CS educational ecosystem: teachers, administrators, and students. Through the nationwide Exploring Computer Science (ECS) program, the project team will further expand curricular resources, professional development offerings to onboard new teachers to teach ECS, and add on new professional learning opportunities for experienced ECS teachers on emerging computing topics, such as the new Artificial Intelligence unit. All curricular developments and teacher learning workshops will include instructional designs that focus on inquiry, equity, and computing concepts, while expanding understanding of antiracism and how to put those principles into practice. The project will continue to investigate the role administrators can play in supporting teachers who are working to broaden participation in computing in their classrooms through identifying and addressing systemic barriers at their school sites. Along with research queries that will examine the efficacy of these efforts in fostering teacher and administrator learning around equity and computing, the project team will also further their line of student voice research to amplify the voices of students in CS education who have been the most marginalized. By extending our constellation of Alliance programs to infuse antiracist design principles and pedagogy in ECS professional development, curricular resources, and research, this work will have nationwide impacts on curricula, professional development agendas, evaluation metrics, antiracist CS education research, and other cohesive resources that support ECS programs. The REAL-CS Alliance Extension will collectively create systemic change by: 1) increasing CS educator and school administrator knowledge, capacity, and use of racially and culturally inclusive practices; 2) refreshing existing ECS curriculum and supplementary curricular materials with antiracist design tenets; 3) conducting deep qualitative research across the US that investigates equity-oriented teacher beliefs and practices, administrator beliefs and practices, and the impact of CS learning experiences from student perspectives. Both programmatic and research efforts from this project will contribute to the broader educational community’s understanding of how to center antiracism in BPC agendas.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.