NSF’s CE21 Project, Computer Science Principles for All Students’ Success (ComPASS) aimed to improve San Diego County’s education system’s capacity for preparing high school and college students of all backgrounds to contribute to and participate in our shared computationally driven economic future. ComPASS adopted and adapted one of five national pilot versions of a CS Principles course developed through the CS10K program, guided by the content and standards established by The College Board’s CS Principles project (http://csprinciples.org/). By training teachers and evaluating implementation in high schools across southern California, the ComPASS team sought insight into challenges facing local CS Principles classrooms and schools from both students’ and teachers’ perspectives. ComPASS partner, San Diego State University (SDSU) aimed to introduce pre-service teachers to the new CS Principles course so they would be prepared to teach it as new teachers. When this goal posed significant challenges, ComPASS staff designed a study to more clearly understand what impediments faced efforts to include CS Principles training within teacher credential programs.

In support of these goals, the project sought to: a) develop and evaluate pedagogical content knowledge curriculum to support teachers in adopting best methods and practices in teaching Computer Science Principles (CSP), b) identify key challenges facing each target audience for CSP in San Diego area schools, c) develop, evaluate, and evolve training and support programs for in-service secondary school teachers with or without computing backgrounds, and pre-service secondary school teachers without computing backgrounds to teach CS Principles, and d) foster sustainable development of the San Diego-area computing education community through the San Diego Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) chapter, integrating support for new teachers.

As a direct result of this project, 24 teachers have taught 108 classes in 27 schools across 9 districts since the inception of ComPASS, most across multiple years. We provided professional development and support for our CS Principles curriculum, which used Alice as a platform and included peer instruction as a pedagogical technique to encourage deeper conceptual learning and collaboration, to over 75 in-service teachers in the 3 funded grant years of this project, and continued to support and study their implementation across 2 no-cost extension years. In addition, over 150 undergraduate non-CS majors at SDSU were exposed to CS Principles via Alice and peer instruction, and more than 30 pre-service teachers in credential programs at SDSU learned about CS Principles and how to teach it and incorporate it into their eventual schools over the duration of the grant. At least 5 of these 30 have gone on to teach CS Principles in their own classrooms, and are connecting to the developing CS Education community in our region.

Over the course of this project we have learned more about what it takes to implement a CS Principles course both inside and outside of the classroom. We have learned that teachers must have buy in from their schools (principals, counselors, students, and parents), that it helps to have district support, and that placement of the course in a student’s schedule and academic plan (e.g. A-G approved, elective status) as well as the school’s master schedule has a real impact on course enrollment and sustained availability. To that end, we supported teachers and schools in submitting the course for A-G approval, and by the end of this grant most CS Principles courses offered within the San Diego region have received University of California approval for college preparatory A-G credit as either mathematics or general electives. And now, with the formal AP designation, further rationale for offering this class is in place. We have learned about successes and challenges in implementing CS Principles (and adapting it to AP) from the teachers teaching the course—more specifically, that they need support from university and district experts as well as a community of peers to succeed. To that end, we have developed and supported a newly revised, interactive LMS-hosted textbook and teacher guide includes additional supporting materials in the form of Programming Scrambles (Parsons' problems) to support student problem solving development skills and online, written versions of Peer Instruction questions to scaffold students’ argumentation and writing skills (The link provided through an on-line form is being used to track downloads for use metrics). We have also continued to support the development of local expertise within districts and community-wide peer groups to support CS Principles implementation. Lastly, we have learned that to influence pre-service teachers and to be able to provide consistent training in teaching CS over time and to many students, we need to next focus on the credential programs themselves, and how to make room and create priority for CS Education training within those programs—not to mention that we will need credential programs to help generate pre-service teacher interest and motivation to teach CS when they go on to get jobs as K12 teachers.

Last Modified: 11/14/2016
Modified by: Karen R Flammer