CUE-T: Micro-credentials for Integrating Computing Responsibly into Other (MICRO) Domains in Colleges of Education

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Georgia State University, in collaboration with the Georgia Department of Education and the International Society of Technology in Education, will partner with California State University Dominguez Hills, North Carolina State University, Southern Connecticut State University, and University of Virginia to develop a generalizable model for integrating computing into colleges of education. Learning computer science is critical for 1) individual professional success as more technical and STEM jobs require computer science knowledge, 2) individual personal success as digital literacy and personal cybersecurity are increasingly required to competently interact via technology, and 3) societal and workforce success as industries leverage computing to solve problems. However, there are significant barriers to everyone learning foundational computer science in the university education system. First, there are a limited number of professors with computer science knowledge, especially outside of computer science departments, to teach these skills. Second, a large portion of the population is underrepresented in computer science, including girls and women, people who are not White or Asian, and people from lower-income families. This project aims to address both barriers by integrating computer science education into teacher preparation programs. Many future teachers represent groups who are underrepresented in computer science and, currently, less than 5% of colleges of education have faculty with computer science knowledge. This project will develop and examine a system for teacher preparation programs that trains education faculty to incorporate and customize existing, evidence-based resources that teach and apply computer science skills to teaching in non-computer-science fields, like English, math, and science. Many of these resources have been developed with NSF support, but education faculty need help applying them to their programs. Thus, this project aims to broaden participation in computing by leveraging existing resources to help teachers integrate computing into their instructional toolkit. It also has significant benefits for teachers’ future students, who will learn computer science as part of their required courses, such as English, math, and science. This Computing in Undergraduate Education Transformation track project addresses the integration of computing in colleges of education, particularly in non-CS teacher preparation programs. The project builds on past work supported by NSF grants #1941642 and #2016010 at Georgia State University, where the project team integrated computing into all teacher preparation programs across disciplines and grades. That work found that teachers quickly recognize computing as a powerful tool for teaching non-CS learning objectives in their future classrooms when CS education faculty collaborate with teacher preparation faculty to make computing solutions that serve their needs. In this project, Georgia State faculty will work with teacher preparation faculty and approximately 1,500 teachers in four colleges of education to develop and pilot a replicable system for colleges of education to incorporate and customize existing resources for computing integration in teacher preparation programs that serve their teachers’ needs. This project focuses on benefits for future teachers in their undergraduate programs to understand 1) how can we adapt and apply existing, external computing education resources to be sustainably integrated into teacher education curricula for future K-12 teachers and 2) what types of knowledge and skills (e.g., content, pedagogical, policy, standards) do teacher education faculty need to sustainably support computing integration? To answer these questions, the project will use a design-based research approach, which draws from both prospective experimental methodologies and reflective ethnographic methodologies to balance rigor and responsivity to local university and policy landscapes. Project staff will collect data from a variety of sources including artifacts, discussion boards, assessments, and surveys. Our primary goal is to enable future, primarily non-CS, teachers to use computing as a powerful pedagogical tool in their classrooms, ultimately preparing a more diverse range of people to use computing across a variety of contexts and challenging problems. In addition, this goal has upstream effects, by enabling the faculty in teacher preparation programs to use computing in their programs, and downstream effects, by giving K-12 students experiences with computing across the curriculum.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.