Talking CS: Using Language to Broaden Participation and Improve Conceptual Understanding

WestEd and the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) are implementing Talking CS: Using Language to Broaden Participation and Building Conceptual Understanding, a Computer Science (CS) for All: Research and RPPs program Research Strand project. This project will create a series of language routines that can be used with any middle school programming curriculum and study their impact on teacher practice and student experience.

Rich classroom discussion, or discourse, centers students' voices and students' thinking and helps students build a learning community. The project aims to study the potential of bringing structured routines for classroom discourse and other supports for academic language, or language routines, to broaden participation of students from historically underrepresented groups in computing, including girls, English learners, Black students, and Latine students attending middle school in OUSD.

Though rich classroom discourse and other supports for academic language have been shown to improve outcomes in science and mathematics, less is known about how they can be effectively integrated in computer science (CS) classes or how they can be used to promote the participation, engagement, and learning of English learners and other minoritized students. Talking CS is adapting a series of classroom language routines, originally designed for math and data science, for teaching middle school algorithms and programming computer science content standards.

The team is also establishing a professional learning community of middle school computer science teachers to share knowledge and best practices for using the discourse routines in their classrooms. The research studies will help the field better understand: a) how to structure CS-specific discourse routines and integrate them within an existing middle school CS curriculum; b) what supports are needed so middle school CS teachers can implement the routines effectively; and c) how the inclusion of classroom discourse affects students' sense of belonging, self-efficacy, and conceptual understanding of core CS content. This project is funded through the Computer Science 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.