CS Education Research in the Community

(CS 396/496)

TBD

Winter 2023

Contact Information

Instructor:

Michael Horn (he/him)

michael.horn@northwestern.edu

Marcelo Worsley (he/him)

marcelo.worsley@northwestern.edu

Class Slack: TBD

Course Description:

CS Education Research in the Community is an opportunity for students to learn about many of the practical aspects of teaching youth computer programming. Students will spend the quarter reading papers about expansive computer science education initiatives. These papers will introduce students to a collection of engaging CS-related projects and curricular materials, as well as facilitation best practices. Throughout the quarter, students will also teach 1-2 computer science lessons within elementary school coding classes every week in partnership with a teacher. In conjunction with teaching youth coding classes, students will begin to practice data collection commonly used within computer science education research. Students will take field notes, produce jottings, and administer surveys to better understand how youth are experiencing the coding curricula. During weekly class sessions, students will discuss the previous week’s visit to the local community school. At the conclusion of the course, students will submit a short paper describing ways that they modified the curriculum and particular facilitation strategies that worked well for their specific context.

Meeting times:

Monday 8:00 - 9:20 CST

Wednesday 8:00 - 9:20 AM CST

Office Hours: Office hours can be scheduled to discuss class material, seek feedback on assignments, papers, or seek advice or mentorship. The teaching staff will be available for 10 minutes following the conclusion of class sessions and 15 minutes prior to each class session. Office hours can also be scheduled by appointment. Please contact the course staff to schedule office hours.

Grading

There are ten homework assignments. Students are expected to complete all assignments on time. All assignments will be graded as either complete or incomplete. In the case that assignments are deemed incomplete, they will be returned for the student to redo.

Please send the teaching staff an email if you need to request an extension for any assignment.   These requests should be submitted more than 48 hour before the assignment deadline. Extensions will not be granted the day that the assignment is due, except under very extenuating circumstances.

All assignments will be submitted through canvas. Late assignments may receive point deductions of ten percent per 24 hour period if no prior arrangements have been made requesting an extension. Additionally, assignments are due at 12 PM central time, on the date posted, unless otherwise noted.

Students will also be assessed based on class participation. As a seminar class, students are expected to actively participate in each class session. Assessment of participation is not based on the volume of participation. Participating more frequently will not necessarily correlate with a higher participation score.

Assignments will be submitted on Canvas.

The grading breakdown is as follows:

• Introductory Survey 0%
• Participation: 20%
• Homework Assignments: 50%
• Final Paper/Curriculum Revisions: 30%
• Final Survey: 0%

Introductory Survey, Final Survey,  and Consent Forms (0%)

Each student is asked to complete a relatively short survey about why they decided to enroll in the course. This survey is anonymous, and will help us cater the class to student needs, while also providing a baseline on what students learn during the course. The survey will ask you to create an alias. Please make a note of your alias as a message to yourself in the class slack. At the conclusion of the course, students will again be asked to complete a short survey describing their experience in the class.

Participation (20%)

Each week, there will be one or more in-class submissions. Students are responsible for submitting these assignments within 24 hours of the end of class. Several of these submissions will be uploaded to Slack or Canvas.

Weekly Jottings, Debrief Notes, and Journal (50% - 5% each week)

An important component of conducting education research is developing and maintaining timely and sufficiently detailed notes about the learning experience being studied. These notes are crucially important to individual reflection and helping others draw inferences about your particular classroom’s experience. Students will keep an online journal where they store these notes. Several of the in-class discussions will involve students discussing their observations with classmates.

Final Paper & Curriculum Revisions (30%)

At the conclusion of the course, students will submit a final paper and some proposed updates to the curriculum. Students can work in groups of 2-3 students to complete this assignment. Students are expected to use the various research papers discussed over the course of the quarter as a model for their final papers. Each paper should provide the reader with background information about why this topic is important, and highlight important prior research in the discipline. It should give the reader context for the kinds of data collected and how they were analyzed. It should also note the authors’ positionality within the project. Most importantly, the paper should highlight proposed changes to the existing curriculum and the authors’ reasoning for these changes. Note: these changes could be in the form of content, technology, facilitation strategy, activity timing and sequencing, etc. A goal is that these student papers can be submitted to a computer science education research conference as an experience report or research paper. Students will present their final projects during the final class session.

Course Policies

Late Assignments

Don't be late.

Academic Honesty

Academic dishonesty is both against course policy and university policy. As much of the lab work is group work you are expected to collaborate with partners, and will not be counted as cheating. Copying and pasting and plagiarism from online and text sources counts as plagiarism. See the university policy for additional details.

Resources

Accommodations

If you have a documented disability (or think you may have a disability) and need a reasonable accommodation to participate in class please contact the Student Disability Student Services. They will provide you with a copy of an Accommodation Letter so that you and I can discuss the best ways to help you succeed in the course.

Title IX Resources and Mandated Reporting 

As faculty members and teaching staff, we are considered an “Individual with Title IX Reporting Responsibilities.” This means that if you disclose to me instances of report all incidents of sexual assault, sexual harassment, other sexual misconduct, dating violence, domestic violence, or stalking, I am required to share this information with the Title IX Coordinator of the University. This person’s job is to advise members of our community on their options regarding remaining anonymous, confidentiality, the University’s process for investigating complaints of sexual misconduct, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking, and the University’s disciplinary process.

Food Security

Our campus has resources if you are in need of access to food. This includes a food pantry, Purple Pantry, that can be accessed by appointment at bit.ly/PurplePantryAppointment or emailed at purplepantry@northwestern.edu.  

Mental Health

Many of us face issues with our mental health over the course of our lives, and sometimes being a student can create or exacerbate these issues. If you are struggling, your mental health is suffering, or you just need someone to talk to, I encourage you to make an appointment with CAPS by calling 847-491-2151 or visiting their site online. Additionally there are several student groups that focus on mindfulness, self care, and support students of various identities.

Undocumented Status

We believe that undocumented students have the right to access education without the fear of deportation. We will not disclose the immigration status of any student who shares this information with me unless required by a judicial warrant. If your status as an undocumented student means that you require certain accommodations to succeed in class, please let us know.

Readings:

Amy Ko: Mindstorms: what did Papert argue and what does it mean for learning and education?

Nasir, N.S., Rosebery, A. S., Warren, B., & Lee, C. D. (2014). Learning as a cultural process: Achieving equity through diversity. In The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, 2nd Edition (pp. 686-706). Cambridge University Press.

Brennan, K., & Resnick, M. (2012, April). New frameworks for studying and assessing the development of computational thinking. In Proceedings of the 2012 annual meeting of the American educational research association, Vancouver, Canada (Vol. 1, p. 25).

Center, K. (2021). Culturally responsive-sustaining computer science education: A framework.

Chang, M. A., Philip, T. M., Cortez, A., McKoy, A., Sumner, T., & Penuel, W. R. (2022). Engaging youth in envisioning artificial intelligence in classrooms: Lessons learned. Rapid Community Report Series.. Digital Promise and the International Society of the Learning Sciences. https://repository.isls.org//handle/1/7670

Jones, S.T., melo, n.a. We Tell These Stories to Survive: Towards Abolition in Computer Science Education. Can. J. Sci. Math. Techn. Educ. 21, 290–308 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42330-021-00158-2

Margolis, J., Estrella, R., Goode, J., Holme, J. J., & Nao, K. (2017). Stuck in the shallow end: Education, race, and computing. MIT press. (Chapters 1 and 2)

Roque, R. Family Creative Learning Guides

Shaw, M. & Kafai, Y. (2020). Charting the Identity Turn in K-12 Computer Science Education: Developing More Inclusive Learning Pathways for Identities. In Gresalfi, M. and Horn, I. S. (Eds.), The Interdisciplinarity of the Learning Sciences, 14th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2020, Volume 1 (pp. 114-121). Nashville, Tennessee: International Society of the Learning Sciences.

Vossoughi, S., Davis, N. R., Jackson, A., Echevarria, R., Muñoz, A., & Escudé, M. (2021). Beyond the binary of adult versus child centered learning: Pedagogies of joint activity in the context of making. Cognition and Instruction, 39(3), 211-241.

Wilkerson, M. H., D’Angelo, C. M., & Litts, B. K. (2020). Stories from the field: Locating and cultivating computational thinking in spaces of learning [Special Issue]. Interactive Learning Environments,28(3), 264-271.

Worsley, M. (2022). PE++: Exploring Opportunities for Connecting Computer Science and Physical Education in Elementary School. In Interaction Design and Children (IDC '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 590–595. https://doi.org/10.1145/3501712.3535293

Quarter at a Glance: