Culturally Responsive Computing: Supporting Diverse Justice Projects In/As Computer Science Education

Broadening Participation and Success in AP CSA: Predictive Modeling from Three Years of Data

“…While early equity analyses have focused primarily on gender representation in CS and programming [9,17,27], more recent calls for equity in CS challenge the field to recognize the importance of the intersections between gender and race representations [23,30]. Additionally, there has been a strong push to leverage the cultural affordances of diverse students' positional identities that could plausibly lead to ways of developing transformative and innovative initiatives to broaden participation and success in CS by drawing from social justice paradigms to think about the future of the field at K-12 grade levels [7,37,41].…”

“…When controlling for demographic and other factors, students who reported experiencing higher frequencies of coding practice in their most advanced HS CS course tended to receive higher grades in introductory college CS … However, the positive effect of coding appears to apply only to those students who did not receive parental support in computing … [moreover] none of our pedagogical predictor variables had significant (p < .01) interactions with gender, ethnicity, or race … [and] having taken AP Computer Science A in HS [high school] -as opposed to a non-AP CS course -did not significantly predict grades in college CS. This analysis presents an intriguing piece to the puzzle related to the impact of (1) broadening participation through more novel AP CS coursework, such as AP CS P, that doesn't provide extensive coding exposure; (2) increasing CS success for under-represented students via outside-of-school initiatives; and (3) to what extent we may want to reconsider the interaction between AP CS A courses and what role they play in larger conversations about the purpose of CS at the K-12 level currently being researched [7,37,41].…”