CSforAll: Small: RPP: High School Strand: Supporting Persistence and Science Teacher Identity in Pre- and In-Service CS Educators from Backgrounds Underrepresented in STEM

Enhancing the computational skills of all American students is essential to building a robust and globally competitive workforce, yet efforts to integrate computation into K-12 education has highlighted a massive shortfall in appropriately trained educators, especially those from backgrounds already underrepresented in STEM. This high school-focused Research Practitioner Partnership will bring together computation and science education experts from Columbia University and the City University of New York (CUNY) to understand the challenges facing K-12 educators in the New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) as they seek to increase their computational expertise, and to provide both professional and curricular support to those already teaching computational courses at the high school level.

By generating new insights into the types of support that K-12 teachers need to bring high-quality computational learning into the classroom and ensure its meaningful integration across courses and grade levels, this project will inform the design of education and professional development programs that effectively recruit and retain high-quality computational K-12 educators, especially those coming from backgrounds underrepresented in STEM.

Despite recent strides in developing computational curricula at the K-12 level, the United States faces a deficit of effective computational educators, especially from backgrounds underrepresented in STEM. Recent research highlights a number of obstacles to recruiting and retaining computational educators from backgrounds underrepresented in STEM, including missing pre- and in-service preparation and professional networks, workplace isolation and insufficient support in developing and delivering culturally aligned and pedagogically coherent curricula.

The goal of this work is to develop a robust high school research practitioner partnership (HS-RPP) between Columbia University, City University of New York (CUNY) researchers and practitioners and New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) teachers to reveal challenges teachers experience with existing Computer Science(CS)/Computational Thinking(CT) certification pathways, and to conduct exploratory research on the efficacy of peer support and professional development in curricular coherence for enhancing science teacher identity - and therefore persistence - for high school instructors from backgrounds underrepresented in STEM.

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.