| NSF Org: |
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 12, 2013 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | June 5, 2014 |
| Award Number: | 1339270 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Janice Cuny
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | January 1, 2014 |
| End Date: | December 31, 2017 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $814,886.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $830,886.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2014 = $16,000.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
2121 EUCLID AVE CLEVELAND OH US 44115-2226 (216)687-3630 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
2121 Euclid Ave Cleveland OH US 44115-2214 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
Special Projects - CNS, Computing Ed for 21st Century |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
Cleveland State University (CSU) in collaboration with the University of California San Diego (UCSD), proposes CISS -- Computing in Secondary Schools -- a CS10K project designed to provide computer science education professional development to high school teachers throughout the state of Ohio. Through participation in CISS, high school teachers will become fluent in computational thinking and will develop the skills needed to teach the new AP CS Principles course. The teachers will be supported through access to course materials, pedagogy, mentoring, weekly telephone meetings, mid-year workshops and technical coaches. Teachers will also have access to an online knowledge repository, CS Learning Commons, which will be used to address challenges that arise and share best practices. Specifically the project will (1) recruit, train, and assist 30 high school teachers in teaching CS in their classroom; (2) prepare and teach an open online course focused on CS education, which will include both content knowledge required to teach CS at the high school level as well as the pertinent pedagogical techniques; (3) widen the CS teacher pipeline by offering a teacher licensure pathway; (4) create a replicable network design model for CS teacher training and mentoring by engaging with an online school network; and (5) establish CS mentoring programs for high school teachers with a focus on gender diversification and participation by minority teachers. Additional partners include the Ohio STEM Learning Network (OSLN) and school districts geographically dispersed throughout the state of Ohio. This project will leverage the work already done on ComPASS CS10K award and will increase our understanding of its scaling to a wider audience.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Computing in Secondary Schools is a NSF-funded (CNS 13-39270, PI: Nigamanth Sridhar, Co-PIs: Debbie Jackson, Karla Hamlen Mansour, Santosh Misra) CS10K project at Cleveland State University, in collaboration with the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The project aimed to increase the number of qualified Computer Science teachers in Ohio by providing professional development in contextualized computing and peer instruction pedagogy, modeled after UCSD’s ComPASS (Computing Principles for All Students’ Success) project. Broad goals of the CISS project mirrored the goals of the CS10K community (http://cs10kcommunity.org) to promote computational thinking for all students by training a large number (10,000) of teachers in introductory Computer Science through curricular programs such as Computer Science Principles and Exploring Computer Science. As a part of this community, the CISS project has contributed to the goals of CS10K, and continues as part of that community to support the CS for All movement (https://www.csforall.org).
The CISS proposal also outlined five key outcome goals:
(1) 24 in-service high school teachers will be trained in computer science using CS Principles, and will receive support from CISS while they teach the course in their respective schools;
(2) A replicable curriculum model for training teachers to teach basic computing high school courses, along with an open online course that can serve as a resource for teachers on an ongoing basis, and a mixed methods research study around the impacts and design of such a course.
(3) A documented history of the project that captures and quantifies the impact of these courses on teachers and students;
(4) A sustainable support system for high school CS teachers; and
(5) Broad dissemination of lessons learned including presentation of research results in conferences and outreach to other universities where there is interest in replicating the CISS model.
Over the course of the project, the project team worked with nearly 60 teachers from all across Ohio, of which the total teacher fellows (cohorts 1, 2, and 3) completing training, assessments, surveys, and teaching the CS Principles course is 40, which far exceeds the initial project goal of 24 teacher fellows (8 per year).
CISS training for teachers consisted of three phases:
- A one-week summer institute on content training in the CS Principles course.
- A six-week online course focused on CS Principles content.
- A one-week summer institute (later in the same summer) on pedagogical training in peer instruction teaching methods.
During the course of the academic year following the training, the teachers participated in a peer-learning community, which met online (using Google Hangouts) as well as in physical meetings convened by the project team. These meetings served to build community among the teachers and provided a vehicle for them to be continuously engaged with each other and with the project team.
Key results from research on this project were presented in a paper at ACM SIGCSE 2018:
Karla Hamlen, Nigamanth Sridhar, Lisa Bievenue, Debbie K. Jackson, and Anil Lalwani. 2018. Effects of Teacher Training in a Computer Science Princi- ples Curriculum on Teacher and Student Skills, Confidence, and Beliefs. In SIGCSE ’18: The 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education, February 21–24, 2018, Baltimore , MD, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3159450.3159496
A key goal of our project was to increase the quantity as well as quality of computer science courses available to students across Ohio. Our project has, in fact, had a significant impact in this regard, reaching nearly twice as many teachers and schools as we originally planned. Along the way, we also learned a few other lessons about barriers (these are documented in the paper listed above).
In our current work, which grew out of lessons learned from the CISS project, we are working to design a CS for All program for an entire urban district (the Cleveland Metropolitan School District), with the emphasis on “for all;” specifically African American students. As such, we have designed recruitment methods, as well as support structures in our community of practice that are designed to compensate for this self-selection bias among teachers
Last Modified: 05/11/2018
Modified by: Nigamanth Sridhar
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