Collaborative Research: Impacts of State Policy on Computer Science Participation and Teacher Preparation

There is widespread interest in broadening participation in computer science (CS) education to improve academic and economic outcomes for individual students and for the country as a whole. To accomplish this, states have increasingly adopted and invested in policies to expand the availability of CS courses, to encourage student participation in CS courses, and to ensure the availability of qualified CS teachers.

However, evidence is needed on the extent to which these policies have succeeded. By combining data on states' adoptions of CS education policies with data on high schools and institutions of higher education, this project aims to provide evidence on how those policies affect outcomes of interest to policymakers. Results from this project will provide evidence pointing to specific policy levers that are effective for expanding CS education and for addressing inequities that have been well documented in CS education.

This project will be a nationwide analysis of the effects of states' CS education policies and represents a research partnership between the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Kansas State University. It will use a longitudinal data set spanning the years 2000-2022. This data set will be unique in two ways.

First, it will include a novel data set on the timing of states' adoptions of specific CS education policies (e.g., requiring that all high schools offer CS or creating preservice CS teacher preparation programs). Second, policy adoption data will be combined with longitudinal administrative data on CS high school course taking, undergraduate enrollments, current high school teachers, and teacher certification that is available either publicly or in state data warehouses.

Once combined, this data set will allow specific state policies to be statistically linked to specific CS educational outcomes. Specifically, the project will answer four research questions: To what extent do state CS education policies affect (1) course taking in high school; (2) enrollment and graduation in CS and CS-related majors; (3) the production of CS teachers; and (4) the qualifications and characteristics of high school CS teachers?

Answering these questions will take advantage of the fact that different states adopted different policies at different times and will involve recent advancements in "event study" modeling that allows for causal inferences about both the short- and long-term impacts of policies. This will provide the most rigorous causal evidence to date about the impacts of policies on broadening participation in CS and how those impacts vary over time.

These results will be disseminated through conference presentations, journal articles, essays in practice- and policy-oriented outlets, and engagement with meetings of state and local policymakers and school administrators. This project is funded 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.