AboutThe interest in Computer Science (CS) across Alabama has grown over the past decade from only three high schools teaching AP CSA to over 69 schools offering AP CS Principles (CSP). Google CS4HS and the NSF have helped to initiate in-service teacher capacity through professional development (PD) opportunities, but future demand for K-12 CS necessitates the preparation of pre-service teachers to address the growing need. The University of Alabama (UA) has been an official College Board CSP Pilot since 2011, which led to the introduction of the CS 104 course entitled “CS Principles.” Each year, CS 104 introduces the core CSP curriculum to approximately 80 potential teachers of Mathematics and CSP who are majoring in Secondary Education Mathematics (SEMA) through a partnership between the CS and SEMA Faculty at UA. This proposed project continues the partnership between the College of Education and the Department of Computer Science at UA to develop an advanced sequence course to CS 104 (CS 492) as a training pathway that will prepare SEMA students to offer the AP CSP course at their future high school.
Broader ImpactsMany of the SEMA students are from rural and urban areas with Title 1 schools. The students often return back to their communities after graduation, providing an opportunity for them to introduce in many cases the first CS course in their school. SEMA students participating in the project will also receive instruction about how to recruit young women and other underrepresented minorities into their course. Students will be required to produce a term report on a topic that they investigate related to underrepresentation and the need for diversity in CS, and how the CSP course can help balance the enrollment across underrepresented minority students. The results of the project will be disseminated through publications at SIGCSE and NCTM, to bridge both the CS and SEMA aspects of the project. The project contributions will include open access to all curriculum and resources.
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How?The intellectual merit of the proposed project will be realized across the following phases: 1) Develop a deep sequence of training and curriculum that involves five experiences for SEMA PSTs, in collaboration with local research-practitioner partnership (RPP) members; 2) Pilot the training experiences over two years across two cohorts of students with extensive evaluation and analysis of the emerging best practices that support sustainability and scalability. The project will investigate a new model for preparing pre-service teachers to realize the CSforAll goal of scaling teacher availability to tens of thousands of schools.The focus of this proposal is an insight into the potential for training SEMA students to be the agents for introducing at least one new CS course. The results from the project’s research questions will help other universities understand how an RPP can assist in training a new pipeline of CSP teachers from among SEMA students who have little pre-existing content knowledge.
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