Student-Centered Computing: Teacher Experiences in a New Introductory Computer Science Curriculum

The Culturally Authentic Practice to Advance Computational Thinking in Youth (CAPACiTY) project [4] was funded by the National Science Foundation in 2016 to develop a new curriculum for the introductory high school computer science course in the Georgia Department of Education's Career, Technical and Agricultural Education program. The resulting course curriculum, now titled Student-Centered Computing (SCC), was designed to provide students with an engaging introductory computer science experience that would encourage all students to continue to pursue coursework in computer science, with a specific focus on promoting continued interest in CS among girls and underrepresented minority students. Key elements of the curriculum, described in depth later in the paper, include an inquiry-driven, collaborative, project-based learning (PBL) approach and the inclusion of culturally authentic practices (CAPs) that support students’ voice, choice and sense of critical agency. These practices are grounded in the psychological literature on agency, identity development, and stereotype threat, and align with the principles of culturally responsive teaching (CRT; Gay, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1995) [5, 6] and culturally responsive computing (CRC; Scott et al., 2015) [7]. The curriculum encourages students to bring their personal interests and experiences to bear on their coursework by prompting them to choose a focal problem that is interesting and meaningful to them, team up with like-minded students, and use that topic as the driver for a year-long project. Throughout the course, students develop rigorous computational thinking skills as they create a narrated PowerPoint presentation and a website to raise awareness of their chosen problem, digitally produce music aimed at creating emotional connections to their problem, and design an app-based game to engage users in solutions to the focal problem. Through the creation of this series of digital artifacts, students work to spread awareness and promote positive change within the context of their selected focal problem, such that students are empowered to promote social good via informing and engaging an audience with technological tools and products.

The SCC curriculum is explicitly designed to encourage the development of critical CS agency, to reduce identity threat, and to promote asset-based thinking and a sense of belonging both in the course and in the larger field of CS. The project's theory of change model, based broadly on work done by Appleton et al. (Appleton, Christenson, and Furlong, 2009) [8] and consistent with the 2021 NASEM [2] report, is shown in Figure 1.

Underlying this theory of change model is the belief that when teachers adjust their classroom practice to better attend to the cultural and social needs of under-served and under-represented students, this can help increase these students’ sense of autonomy, competence, and belonging. These changes in student's view of self can, in turn, lead to increased engagement and ultimately to improved student outcomes such as increased learning of computer science skills and an increased number of students intending to take additional computer science courses.

The SCC framework, which outlines the pedagogical underpinnings of the SCC curriculum, incorporates student-centered pedagogical strategies commonly used in PBL and research-based CAPs that are designed to nurture students’ choice, voice and identity in the classroom. The research-based PBL strategies incorporated into the SCC framework, described as the “Gold Standard” by the Buck Institute for Education (2023) [9], have been shown to promote deep student learning by enabling student's exploration, promoting understanding of content through sustained inquiry, encouraging authentic engagement with challenging real-life problems, and promoting reflection, discussion and collaboration (Bransford, Broan, and Cocking, 1999) [10].

The CAPs activities embedded throughout the SCC curriculum are highly scaffolded and were all designed using best practices from culturally relevant education frameworks (Dover, 2009 [11]; Gay, 2010 [12]; Ladson-Billings, 1994 [13]), asset-based pedagogy (Esteban-Guitart and Moll, 2014 [14]; Lopez, 2017 [15]), motivational theories such as self-determination (Ryan and Deci, 2000 [16]), and stereotype threat interventions (Steele, Spencer, and Aronson, 2002) [17]. Prior research suggests that focusing on these principles, both in the scaffolded curriculum materials and in the teacher professional development workshops, should lead to changes in classroom practices that better enable students to experience a sense of autonomy, competence, and belonging in their computer science classroom (Deci and Ryan, 2008 [18]).

Of particular emphasis in the SCC theory of change model, as well as in the pedagogical approaches and the curricular activities, is the notion of critical computer science agency. This concept is linked to several theoretical perspectives, including critical computational literacy (Lee and Soep, 2016) [19] and critical science agency (Barton and Tan, 2010) [20] (please see Gale, Alemdar, Boice, Hernandez, Newton, Edwards, and Usselman, 2022 [21] for a further exploration of critical CS agency development in students enrolled in SCC). Drawing from the three tenets of Basu et al.’s (2009) [22] conceptualization of critical science agency and tailoring it to a CS context, Gale et al., 2022 [21], offer the following definition of critical CS agency: “a collective process in which students gain CS knowledge and skills, come to identify themselves as experts in CS, and, in the process of CS identity development, see and use CS as a mechanism for change” (p. 274). The element of change serves to distinguish critical agency from more general conceptualizations of agency; in a critical agency perspective, individuals use their knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) to enact some positive change upon themselves and/or their surrounding environment. Critical agency entails KSAs deployed for action toward a goal of improving someone or something.

How does this concept play out within SCC? The SCC curriculum, unlike peer curricula such as Exploring Computer Science (exploringcs.org, 2023) [23], does not open with questions of technology: “What is a computer?”, “What does a computer do?”, “Where do you find computers in your daily life”? Rather, SCC opens with questions of humanity: “What is a societal problem that interests you, that you care about, and that you are motivated to address?”. The first several weeks of a SCC class consist of a highly scaffolded process of problem selection, pedagogically based on best practices of PBL, during which students identify a problem that is of personal relevance and interest to them and that is of appropriate scope to support continued student interest for the whole year. Digital tools, skills, and programs are then introduced as a means to address this problem, thus enacting positive change. Little to no instruction on digital or computational KSAs is offered outside of the context of either addressing the focal problem or within activities specifically crafted to reduce identity threat and promote CS identity. The SCC teacher support materials, combined with the summer professional development, provide teachers with pedagogical tools to help guide students to identify problems they want to address, and then to offer students the digital tools they can use to address these problems.

This approach to teaching CS, with an emphasis on critical CS agency, also aligns with the related theories of culturally responsive computing (CRC) and culturally responsive teaching (CRT). CRC is “focused on how culturally responsive pedagogical strategies could be used to make technologies and technology education accessible to diverse sociocultural groups using asset building approaches” (Scott et al., 2015, p. 413) [7]. CRT, the approach on which CRC largely rests, stands in contrast to deficit models, in which the attributes, backgrounds, and communities of some populations are viewed as inherently problematic. CRT instead highlights these elements as both fertile ground for learning and of utility for application in educational contexts (Scott et al., 2015) [7]. In her work with the Exploring Computer Science (ECS) curriculum in high school classrooms, Ryoo (2019) [24] reports that attending to social issues directly impacting students as well as utilizing students’ voices and perspectives serve to increase interest in, and engagement with, the CS content. SCC embraces this notion of individual attributes and experiences being of deep educational value by allowing the students’ own selected problems to serve as the basis and context for the entire school years’ worth of projects. Justifications for employing CRT methods follow two lines of thinking: (1) social justice justification, such that this pedagogy helps students respond against the “dominant culture” and promotes social consciousness, and (2) academic, in that this type of teaching has been linked to improved academic performance (Scott et al., 2015) [7]. SCC seems well suited to address the following stated goal of CRC: “to diminish the separation between the worlds of culture and STEM” (Scott et al., 2015) [7].

In many extant culturally relevant computing curricula, experiences, and programs, the designer anticipates and creates what they believe will be a culturally relevant context for the participating students. In SCC, this role of selecting and building a culturally relevant context for CS education has been transferred from the designers to the participating students. SCC is not the only curriculum to utilize this role transfer; see Scott et al., 2015 [7]’s review of culturally responsive computing curricula, specifically, COMPUGIRLS. Rote instruction on the content and use of technology tools, programs, and skills is avoided entirely in SCC. Instead, students learn about digital tools primarily within the context of the creation of digital artifacts to promote awareness of and solutions for their self-selected societal problems. The goal of eliciting students’ CS critical agency via their development of technological skills and tool use, promotion of identity as an expert in the CS arena, and creation of digital artifacts to enact positive change echoes the following treatment of what constitutes success within CRC: “CRC contends that success is how far an individual operationalizes their developing agency as a technosocial agent to further their communities through systematic methods” (Scott et al., 2015, p. 427) [7]. Further expounding on this notion of technosocial change agents, a concept with high overlap with the idea of CS critical agency, Ashcraft et al. (2017) [25] note that computing curricula need to take “a more culturally responsive approach that engages girls in becoming technosocial change agents; that is, individuals who can challenge dominant narratives and construct more liberating identities and social relations as they create new technologies” (p. 234).

Further emphasis on the need to promote culturally relevant CS education comes from the Kapor Center's Framework (Kapor Center, 2021) [26], in which they characterize culturally responsive – sustaining CS pedagogy as “[ensuring] that students’ interests, identities, and cultures are embraced and validated, students develop knowledge of computing content and its utility in the world, strong CS identities are developed, and students engage in larger socio-political critiques about technology's purpose, potential, and impact“ (p. 5). This last phrase about socio-political critiques overlaps with the previously discussed CS critical agency and technosocial change agents. The Kapor Center's Framework includes six components of culturally responsive-sustaining CS pedagogy, each of which is accompanied by multiple action items. These items are intended to direct CS educators towards providing CS pedagogy optimized to engage and motivate all learners by promoting individual connection to the material and culturally relevant instruction. Action items from this framework that align well with SCC pedagogy and curricular activities include:

Taken together, this body of literature and theory posits that effective CS instruction must position digital tools as a mechanism for creating artifacts aimed toward enacting positive change and disrupting inaccurate narratives within the context of problems and situations that students identify with and care about.

Given its importance for diversifying the CS pipeline, it is useful to consider whether CS teachers in general perceive a need for culturally responsive curriculum materials and whether they would feel comfortable implementing these materials. Prior work on teacher attitudes and values around culturally relevant CS teaching and curricula gives some insight on this question and provides context for situating the SCC curriculum and anticipating teachers’ potential reactions to it. In a 2020 survey of roughly 3,700 PreK-12 CS teachers that probed their views on the extent to which CS education does and should include topics of justice, equity, and cultural relevance, only 61% of teachers profiled believed that topics of inequity should be covered within their computer science class (Koshy et al., 2021) [27]. With respect to their current CS curriculum, roughly two out of every three of these teachers felt their existing curriculum met the needs of a diverse student body while just over half believed the curriculum was culturally relevant and matched students’ interests. Findings from this same survey related to teacher identity indicate that while CS teachers are highly committed to teaching CS and feel confident about being able to help their students learn to value CS and increase their self-efficacy for CS, they feel somewhat less capable of motivating students with low CS interest and just under 60% of teachers felt prepared to utilize culturally relevant teaching practices in their CS classes (Koshy et al., 2021; Ni et al., 2023) [27, 28]. Taken together, these survey responses highlight three opportunities for improving equity, justice, and cultural relevance in PK-12 CS education: (1) Help teachers see the value and relevance of these topics, such that they will feel a desire to teach using culturally relevant pedagogy; (2) Provide curricula and other instructional materials that are designed to incorporate culturally relevant pedagogy and student-centered topics; and (3) Train teachers on how to utilize culturally relevant pedagogies in their CS classrooms. The SCC curriculum, when combined with aligned teacher professional development, seeks to accomplish these goals.

This paper documents the development of and theoretical grounding for the SCC curriculum. We also offer reporting on teachers’ experiences with implementing an early iteration of the curriculum. The research questions explored in this work are as follows:

The SCC curriculum is comprised of four units that span the course as one year-long project. The first semester includes two units covering media literacy and web design, and the second semester consists of two units that introduce students to programming and application building. The SCC curriculum was designed to meet both the curriculum standards developed by the Georgia Department of Education for the Introduction to Digital Technology (IDT) course and the standards developed by the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) for K-12 education. What follows is a brief synopsis of the course, highlighting these standards. Representative examples of activities are then included in more depth in the curriculum analysis using Weintrop et al.’s TEC rubric [1].

The development and implementation of the SCC curriculum and its accompanying research activities were guided by the design-based implementation research (DBIR) framework (Penuel et al., 2011) [30]. This framework hinges on a collaborative approach between researchers and practitioners and entails the “development and testing of innovations that foster alignment and coordination of supports for improving what takes place in classrooms” (Penuel et al., 2011, p. 331) [30]. Across the two years of active curriculum implementation (2017-2018 and 2018-2019), focal teachers worked closely with researchers on the CAPACiTY project team. Researchers held multiple professional development sessions as well as attended weekly calls with teachers to discuss their implementations and troubleshoot problems. Teachers also provided frequent, detailed feedback on various aspects of their implementations via weekly curriculum enactment surveys. This implementation data from teachers provided valuable information to inform subsequent iterations of the curriculum. These activities align with the emphasis on “iterative, collaborative design” and “systematic inquiry” inherent in the DBIR approach. An example of this is that in Year 1 of the curriculum implementation, teachers reported that Unit 1, which covers problem selection and the creation of a narrated PowerPoint presentation, was too long and included too many iterations on the digital artifact. Teachers noted that students became bored during this unit and were eager to proceed to other digital tools, especially given their prior knowledge of PowerPoint. As a result of this feedback, Unit 1 was shortened considerably.

School administrators, teachers, students, and school district level personnel were all directly involved in curriculum development, implementation, and/or research activities, satisfying the DBIR element of conceptualizing and investigating problems from the perspectives of all stakeholders. Lastly, the DBIR component pertaining to sustainability of interventions and systemic changes was addressed by expanding professional development on the SCC curriculum as well as continuing research activities among larger groups of teachers from a wider range of school districts. The DBIR framework represents a current best practice in educational research focused on large-scale interventions, and the tenets of this framework are well-represented in this project.

The Student-Centered Computing curriculum was first piloted and assessed in two high schools within IDT classes during the 2017-2018 academic year. Based on formative data collected during that year, the curriculum was modified and implemented again in two schools during the 2018-2019 academic year. The results presented in this paper were collected during this second year. One teacher in each school implemented the curriculum across multiple class periods. The schools are each located in separate metro Atlanta school districts. While primarily intended as a freshman level course, there were students in the course at both schools in all four high school grade levels (i.e., 9th grade through 12th grade). Both teachers implementing the SCC curriculum during the 2018-2019 school year were veteran computer science teachers; they are both White and female. One of the teachers was implementing the SCC curriculum for the first time and the other was implementing it for the second time, having also participated in this project and implemented an earlier version of the curriculum during the 2017-2018 academic year. General information about the two focal schools is summarized in Table 1. Students self-selected into the SCC course. The gender ratio in all classes was majority male, as is typical in high school computer science classes.

For the research aspect of the overarching project for which the SCC curriculum was developed, a mixed-methods approach using a convergent parallel design (Cresswell and Plano Cark, 2011) [31] was taken. Teacher data were collected via online enactment surveys and periodic interviews. The variety of methods and data sources allowed researchers to collect both more general data about teachers’ experiences with the curriculum (through qualitative data), as well as to elicit participants’ completion of the curriculum at a high level of granularity (through quantitative data). Teacher enactment surveys consist of a yes/no checklist for specific activities within a given section, plus open-ended items on modifications made and challenges. Teacher interviews were conducted by researchers who utilized a semi-structured interview protocol. Open-ended enactment survey items as well as transcribed teacher interviews were analyzed by a single coder using hypothesis coding methodology. “Hypothesis coding is the application of a researcher-generated, predetermined list of codes…The codes are developed from a theory/prediction about what will be found in the data (Saldana, 2013) [32]. In this case, codes were derived from the TEC rubric and teacher feedback was categorized into discussion of a success or a challenge with respect to the TEC rubric element. Each data source and its accompanying methods are summarized in Table 2 below.

The TEC Rubric's Content Dimension contains five subcategories—(1) Computing Content; (2) Instructional Design: Pedagogical Practices; (3) Instructional Design: Content; (4) Theme; and (5) Assessment. The Computing Content strand addresses whether the content aligns with standards, exhibits an appropriate learning progression, and uses appropriate disciplinary terminology. The two categories of Instructional Design together include concepts such as whether the curriculum considers students’ prior knowledge, promotes higher order thinking, includes open-ended prompts, encourages students to collaborate and reflect on their learning, utilizes a mix of instructional strategies, and provides students with the opportunity to share their work and receive peer feedback. Please see Table 3 for a summary of the Computing Content and Instructional Design subcategories and Table 4 for the activities corresponding to each dimension. The Theme strand pertains to whether non-computing contexts used for framing create a coherent and accurate storyline, and the Assessment strand addresses whether formative and summative assessments are included, along with relevant rubrics. The following analysis, presents the dimension of computing content and the two dimensions of instructional design as they are operationalized within the SCC curriculum, along with teachers’ perspectives on the benefits and challenges they encountered during implementation for curricular components where relevant teacher feedback was present in the data. Because of the structure of the SCC curriculum, in which students choose their own focal topic for their year-long project, the “Theme” dimension is discussed in the section of the paper addressing the challenges presented by allowing and enabling student choice of a focal topic. And given this paper's focus on teacher experiences with the curriculum itself, the development and initial implementation of SCC-aligned assessment instruments are not presented here. For information on the assessments developed within this project, please see Newton, Alemdar, Rutstein, Edwards, Helms, Hernandez, and Usselman, 2021 [33].

The TEC Rubric's Equity Dimension contains three subcategories—Culture (community-level), Identity (individual-level) and Exceptionalities (ELL, Special Ed., etc.). Concepts in the community-level Culture category include that the curriculum reflects diverse cultural heritages, enables students to share their own culture, and connects learning to students’ home life. Examples of individual-level Identity concepts are that the curriculum is meaningful and authentic for students, enables students to see themselves represented in the materials, and gives them the opportunity to share their life experiences and represent themselves in their projects. The Exceptionalities category assesses whether the curriculum includes multiple representations within a lesson to accommodate diverse and exceptional learners and provides extensions to deepen the learning experience for more advanced students. Please see Table 6 for a summary of the Culture, Identity, and Exceptionalities subcategories of the Equity Dimension.

Most of the activities and themes embedded in the SCC curriculum that were designed to promote culturally authentic practices (CAPs) align with the dimensions of culture and identity. The two CAPs that explicitly target issues of culture are (1) Promoting asset-based thinking and sense of belonging and (2) Building equity through collaborative work. The two CAPs that promote individual identity are (1) Building Critical Agency and (2) Addressing social identity/stereotype threat. In addition, the SCC curriculum also provides support for diverse learners and extensions for advanced ones, which corresponds to the exceptionality dimension. The following analysis, summarized in Table 7, presents the manner in which each CAP is infused into the curriculum, along with relevant teacher feedback corresponding to the given CAP when such research results are present in our dataset.

The TEC Teacher Accessibility dimension includes the level of teacher support included in the curriculum, such as whether there is a full lesson plan, whether the materials are educative for teachers with varying levels of skills, and whether it includes student worksheets, assessments, and examples of student misconceptions. Please see Table 8 for a summary of the Teacher Support and Supplemental Materials subcategories of the Accessibility Dimension.

The SCC curriculum provides teachers with a highly scaffolded curriculum that covers two semesters of instruction. Each of the four units is divided into multiple sections that can range from part of a class period to multiple hours, depending upon the work. For example, Unit 3, a 6-week Programming Challenge, contains 20 sections ranging from Section 3.3: Facilitate Design Vision for Musical Intro PowerPoint Challenge (estimated 20 minutes), to Section 3.14: Students learn to code musical layers and develop coded music (200 minutes). Each section provides teachers with well-defined learning goals, the objective and general description of the section, detailed instructions for each activity, estimated time required, and all student instructional materials needed, including worksheets, website links, and videos. In addition, the curriculum site includes resources about implementing Project-Based Learning, and about Culturally Authentic Practices within the course.

Teachers appreciated the overall structure and flow of the curriculum, describing it as being smooth and having continuity across the school year, in that “it's really laid out well…one lesson follows another, and it's kind of a smooth transition, which is helpful for the kids.” One teacher discussed becoming significantly more comfortable upon teaching the lesson for a second time and then subsequent times across her class periods, as compared to her first time teaching the lesson, noting that “I teach a lesson one day, then I teach the same section the next day to a different group of kids, and it's just amazing how much my comfort level increased for that second round.” Specific challenges pertained to needing more scaffolding for some of the coding content in EarSketch and the app development software, as well as struggles with long sections of content delivery.