Computational Thinking Funds of Knowledge: A Culturally-Relevant Assessment for Early Elementary Students

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). It is developing equitable computational thinking (CT) assessments for historically marginalized Black and Hispanic students in the early grades. Children and their families engage in CT in their everyday lives, with such experiences serving as potentially powerful learning and assessment opportunities.

The everyday knowledge of Black and Hispanic families and communities, in particular, must be interwoven with instructional and assessment opportunities, as too often they are not reflected in standard instruction and assessment. Given the lack of diversity in computer science, uncovering the rich CT resources of Black and Hispanic families through research will aid in the development of culturally sustaining assessments tools (CSAT) for CT.

This will help educators leverage what students know in order to find ways to support these underrepresented students. This knowledge will subsequently provide a foundation for development of more equitable CT assessment materials. This approach is transformative, in that it puts family and community knowledge at the heart of assessment development.

It addresses concerns related to the problem of cultural bias in standardized measures of achievement. While focusing on the lived experiences of Black and Hispanic families in Springfield, Massachusetts, the team anticipates that the CSAT for CT will be useful for Black and Hispanic families in mid-sized cities similar to Springfield, and will, therefore, have a broad national impact.

Computational Thinking Funds of Knowledge (CTFoK) is a research project focused on the development of CSAT for CT for students from kindergarten to second grade. It seeks to broaden participation in computer science (CS) by explicitly focusing on the rich resources of Black and Hispanic families as regards their CTFoK enacted through activities of daily living and by creating valid assessments that reflect that knowledge and cultural context.

Through classroom observations, family interviews, and teacher interviews, research in this project will focus on: identifying family and community CTFoK with which children enter school; the effectiveness of the CSAT for measuring CT; young students’ conceptual understanding of CT (grades K-2); teachers’ experience on the project, especially as reflected in knowledge of and valuing of strengths-based approaches to working with Black and Hispanic families and students, and in integrating CS/CT concepts into these teachers’ instructional practices. Traditional assessments have been shown to embed cultural bias, thus perpetuating disadvantage for children of color.

Therefore, it is vitally important that the CS educational research community develop assessment methods that are equitable. The work is transformative on two levels: first it centers family and community knowledge as foundational to children’s prior and future knowledge; and second, it uses this information to create equitable assessment materials.

This work will have a broad impact in providing the results of research to the CSEd community at large. This project is supported through the CS for All: Research and RPPs program.

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.