Aman Yadav, Ph.D. - US grants

This CPATH project creates new pathways for undergraduate education majors to become computer science teachers and to obtain sound foundations in computational thinking. It includes a joint effort between faculty in the departments of computer science and education to create a Computer Science (CS) Endorsement program based on the Educational Computing Standards set by the International Society for Technology in Education. The pathways to the endorsement program will be targeted to diverse student groups: all education majors will be exposed to modules focused on computational thinking, science education majors will be able to fulfill general course requirements while taking courses towards the endorsement, and students transferring into education from a STEM discipline will be able to build on their background.

The proposed effort builds on existing courses and teacher education. Modules on computational thinking that highlight the pervasiveness of computational metaphors in topics like reasoning, knowledge construction, and problem solving are to be integrated into existing courses. Two new courses are to be developed jointly: a CS Methods course with an associated teaching practicum in computer science and a course in Great Issues in Computer Science. These courses provide students with pedagogical and content knowledge experiences preparing them to effectively teach computer science. The team plans to run a workshop to bring together educators and computer scientists with a focus on incorporating computation in secondary teacher education and exploring the establishment of computer science licensure standards.

Intellectual Merit: The design of a CS methods course and the associated collaboration between education and CS faculty should result in a better understanding of how to effectively teach secondary computer science, an urgent need in the nation's high schools. Selected material from the methods course will also benefit computer science faculty teaching introductory courses. Education students satisfying their practical training component in CS introductory courses will increase awareness of good practices and how to effectively teach introductory CS topics. The introduction of a Great Issues course will be of benefit and interest to a broad set of students. Thus the project has the potential to provide a national model for secondary computer science education and contribute to the sparse intellectual core currently existing in this area.

Broader Impact: The goal of the project is to increase the number of undergraduate education majors having taken CS courses and obtaining a CS Teaching Endorsement. This increase should translate into an increase in the number of future teachers who are qualified to teach computer science in high schools, are knowledgeable about computer science as a career, and who have an understanding of how the pervasive nature of computation impacts and changes our society. As a multiplier effect, qualified high school teachers teaching computer science should increase the number of high school students receiving a first computer science course. This increased contact is an important part in the ongoing national effort to raise interest in computer science and to educate a more computationally competent and proficient workforce.

The CIC Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate's Professional Advancement Initiative (PAI) was created in response to the NSF's Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program solicitation (NSF 12-554) for the AGEP-Transformation (AGEP-T) track. The AGEP-T track targets strategic alliances of institutions and organizations to develop, implement, and study innovative evidence-based models and standards for STEM graduate education, postdoctoral training, and academic STEM career preparation that eliminate or mitigate negative factors and promote positive practices for URMs.

The CIC AGEP PAI is a collaboration between the University of Illinois-Champaign (UIUC) and Purdue University (PU) to partner with other university members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC): Indiana University, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Alliance is creating a "Professorial Advancement Initiativ" (PAI) with a goal to increase the number of underrepresented minority (URM) faculty members hired within the CIC partnering institutions. The PAI Alliance participants are URM U.S. citizen in STEM fields. The two objectives for this project are:
Objective 1: To create a pool of URM post-doctoral fellows, prepared and trained to enter the academy as tenure track facility.
Objective 2: To educate faculty and faculty search committees about unconscious bias and diversity hiring.

The objectives have the following measureable outcomes associated with them:
1. The number of URM postdocs recruited into the PAI.
2. The number of PAI applications submitted to the CIC partnering institutions.
3. The number of URM postdocs interviewed with the CIC partnering institutions.
4. The number of offers extended to URMs in the CIC partnering institutions.
5. The number of offers accepted.
6. The number of faculty mentors recruited to participate in the PAI.
7. The number of faculty members participating in PAI hiring committee training program.

The activities that contribute to the model for the CIC's AGEP PAI include implementing:
- A program of small group mentoring for URM postdoctoral fellows across STEM disciplines in the CIC partnering institutions;
- Interactive video-teleconferences for mentors and protégés (aka, the postdoctoral fellows); and
- A program for training faculty and hiring committees.

The proposal includes a social science research study focusing on determining how the mentoring environment, ranging from a micro-systems (e.g., peer-to-peer interactions, faculty-to-peer interactions) to macro-systems (e.g., broader social context), affects the self-efficacy and identity of postdoctoral fellows within their STEM disciplines. Specifically, the team is exploring answers to two primary questions that address the research goal of this project:
1. What is the influence of mentoring on URM postdoctoral fellows' self-efficacy and identities as STEM researchers?
2. How does the degree of importance that STEM postdoctoral fellows place on having a matched mentor background influence their self-efficacy and identities?
A third question explores the impacts of faculty bias on postdoctoral fellows: What is the influence of mentoring experience on faculty's subtle bias towards URM postdoctoral fellows' in STEM disciplines?

Purdue University, in partnership with Project Lead the Way (PLTW), proposes a project entitled "Leading the Way to CS10K: Assessing a Just-in-Time Professional Development Approach for Teacher Knowledge Growth in Computer Science." The project will (i) develop and implement a high-quality professional development approach that incorporates face-to-face training coupled with continuous online just-in-time support at a large-scale; and (ii) assess the effectiveness of that professional development at improving teachers' Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes (KSAs) for teaching computer science. PLTW is a non-profit organization that has successfully implemented innovative and rigorous STEM curriculum in over 4,700 schools and trained 10,500 STEM teachers across the United States. PLTW is introducing a new Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSE) course, which aligns with the CS Principles framework. The CSE course aims to develop students' computational thinking and introduce computational tools that foster creativity. The large network of schools implementing this new course provides the opportunity to implement and study professional development for a large number of teachers, including teachers with little CS background. This large-scale project will establish an evidence-based professional development program to improve teachers' knowledge to teach computer science, and it will deliver empirically validated best practices for providing computer science professional development to teachers, especially those with limited computer science background.

The goal of the proposed project is to use case studies to introduce design thinking to first-generation and underrepresented students to help them transition from classroom and lab-based learning to engineering capstone design and ultimately to their careers in engineering fields. The case studies will be implemented as part of a new discussion section for a Mechanical Engineering class at UC Merced, a Hispanic Serving Institution where over 60% of undergraduates are the first in their families to attend college, more than half come from bilingual or non-English-speaking homes, and more than 75% of students receive financial aid. This project also represents the first collaboration between an associate professor in Mechanical Engineering at UC Merced who teaches design and is familiar with the challenges students face but has no formal training in education, and an associate professor in Educational Psychology at Michigan State University with expertise in case studies and engineering education. The project will have direct impact on the students at UC Merced who participate in the pilot program, longer-term and wider-reaching impact through dissemination of the case studies and evaluation of their success, as well as on the PIs who will learn from each other's expertise and use this as the first step towards future collaborative education innovation.

The engineering profession is a complex and ill-structured domain, and it is recognized that the skill sets which will be required for engineers to successfully fulfill the mission of their profession are much broader than those honed in traditional engineering curricula. This is the premise for promoting and cultivating design thinking in engineering students, and is the focus of the proposed research, which leverages the experiential contexts to develop desired attributes of future engineers. Specifically, this project is based the hypothesis that engaging students in a case-based class before the capstone design course will enable them to both perform better in the design class and will prepare them for real world engineering. This hypothesis will be explored by integrating the component-specific instruction of lectures from an existing Mechanical Component Design course into case studies, with the goal of introducing the students to design thinking. More specifically, design thinking will be taught using case studies that involve the five phases of the Stanford design process: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Given the complex cognitive nature of design thinking, this structured approach will allow students to generate and evolve their solutions/ideas while helping them navigate the challenges of design thinking. The main objectives of this project are to: (1) Develop the PI's expertise in embedding case studies to teach design thinking, (2) establish a library of case studies that use design thinking to expand engineering students' view of problem formulation and solution development, and (3) evaluate the effectiveness of case-based instruction for instilling design thinking behavior in a diverse student population.

The project will research the results of integrating scientific inquiry and computational thinking in elementary schools, focusing on grades 2-5. The need for strengthening computational thinking within STEM education is now recognized as an important priority, but computational thinking receives little attention in our nation's classrooms. Most resources like this to date have been seen as add-ons to the curriculum and have not been widely adopted. In collaboration with teachers, the project will create exemplar lessons that will embed computational thinking in scientific inquiry rather than teaching it as an isolated topic. In intensive summer workshops and afterschool meetings during the academic year, teachers will be engaged in their own adult-level computational thinking and scientific inquiry, to help them develop their own sense of what scientific inquiry and computational thinking are. Starting with the exemplar lessons, the project will work with the teachers to iteratively modify, implement, and refine those lessons. The project research will investigate how and to what extent this approach enhances teacher and subsequent student understanding (through the lessons they have developed) of computational thinking and inquiry. The project will directly impact 20 teachers in 3 schools, and over 1000 students. The resulting model of integrated curriculum and teacher professional development will be widely disseminated at professional conference for researchers and teachers. The model of integrated curriculum and teacher professional development developed by this exploratory project will be developed for potential future scale-up. Computing has become an integral part of everyday practice within modern fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). As a result, the STEM+Computing Partnerships (STEM+C) program seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the integration of computing in STEM teaching and learning.

The project will research the effectiveness of teaching computational thinking by embedding it in the process of science inquiry rather than teaching coding and computational thinking separately and then imposing that on science inquiry. Instead of directly teaching coding, the project will introduce computational ways of thinking, such as algorithmic thinking, problem decomposition, flowcharts, debugging, loops, etc., that can be used in the inquiry process. The project will research if the prototype curriculum supports integrated computational thinking and inquiry, how the curriculum influences student perceptions toward computing and science inquiry, and how teacher professional development activities improve their computational thinking and influences their classroom practices. The research will use a variety of research techniques, including think-aloud interviews, surveys, analysis of classroom video, classroom observations and field notes.

Michigan State University, in partnership with the Oakland Intermediate School District and the American Institute for Research, proposes a project--CT4EDU--that will design, implement, and assess a high-quality, integrated curriculum, and professional development that supports elementary school teachers in embedding computational thinking (CT) into their classrooms. Currently exposure to CT is too often limited to students participating in an accelerated curriculum (i.e. gifted and talented) or in after school activities (i.e. coding clubs). This is a highly inequitable system in which only those students who have the resources and access can build on CT in their elementary years. By embedding CT into 3rd to 5th grade, in-school science and mathematics curriculum, this project aims to give all students early access to computing.

This proposal will establish a Research Practitioner Partnership (RPP) using a Network Improvement Community approach to identifying problems of practice and points of opportunity in curriculum/teaching practices where CT can intersect with science and mathematics at the elementary level. Teachers, curriculum directors, and researchers will co-design CT activities and lesson plans in the context of their elementary school classrooms. They will also collaborate in addressing equity issues around engaging historically underrepresented students in CT, focusing on student participation in classroom discourse during CT activities. Finally, the researchers will examine the impact of the CT curriculum on student thinking and teacher practices around computing.

The significance of the proposed project is that it will establish the value of Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) as an approach to teaching computer science. The POGIL approach has been shown in other STEM disciplines to increase student learning and retention, particularly for students from underrepresented populations, including females and minorities. There has not yet been a concerted effort to teach computer science using the POGIL approach. The creation of a computer science POGIL community, which is a fundamental aspect of this proposal, is a necessary step to providing an evaluation of the effectiveness of POGIL in computer science education. Broader and more effective use of strategies such as POGIL will improve the quality, quantity, and diversity of students who complete STEM programs.

The main goal of this project is to study factors that most influence faculty to adopt POGIL in introductory computer science courses and how the degree of POGIL implementation impacts student learning and engagement. A secondary goal is to make it significantly easier for computer science faculty to adopt POGIL, by disseminating high quality instructional resources and enhancing current professional development practices. The project theory of action is that enhanced instructor support will improve faculty adoption of and persistence with POGIL, which in turn will improve student outcomes. To assess the impact of these and other factors, the project will collect and analyze multi-institutional data including surveys, interviews, and student learning outcomes.

This project brings computer science (CS) and computational thinking (CT) content to students with disabilities. Approximately 6.7 million students with disabilities receive special education services in US public schools. In order to broaden participation their in computing, Michigan State University will develop and implement CS/CT content within special education teacher preparation to make CS/CT sustainable and integral parts of schooling. The project will work with special education, preservice teachers so all learners have opportunities to learn CS/CT ideas and apply CS/CT practices from an early age, as they do for mathematics. This project proposes to explore ways to embed CS/CT into an existing special education mathematics methods course and examine whether and how it develops preservice teacher competencies in CS/CT.

Specifically, the project will:

1. Revise a special education mathematics methods course around CS/CT to prepare preservice teachers to embed computational ideas into their day-to-day classroom activities and to show how instructional approaches and frameworks, such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL) can be used to provide access for students with disabilities within integrated CS/CT lessons.

2. Examine whether and how CT-integrated coursework influences special education preservice teachers' knowledge, skills, and attitudes towards embedding CS/CT in their teaching.

Given that large number of course requirements for teacher education students to obtain licensure makes it unrealistic to add new curricula to teacher preparation, this research will inform how teacher educators could embed computational skills within existing coursework. The CS/CT integrated materials, activities, and assessments would be open-source and disseminated to allow others to adapt them to meet their own teacher education needs.

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.

As computing plays an increasingly important role in all industries, the demand for skills in information technology and software have skyrocketed while the associated training infrastructure has not kept pace. The need for a workforce with a background in computing is particularly important for the economy of the greater Detroit area, which is driven by the automotive and manufacturing sectors. However, two primary limitations that inhibit the penetration of computer science in Detroit-area high schools are: (1) a lack of teachers who have sufficient preparation and confidence to teach the material, and (2) students who lack the awareness and interest to undertake such courses when they are available. Researchers from University of Detroit Mercy and Michigan State University are partnering to broaden participation and increase access to quality computer science instruction for high school students in Detroit. This project will increase the awareness and interest of students underrepresented in computer science and educate high school teachers to deliver high-quality computer science instruction.

The project will use a sustainable multi-pronged approach to build the capacity of underserved high schools to offer CS curriculum in the metro-Detroit area. The components of the project include: (a) training of incumbent high school teachers through a unique co-teaching model with university faculty, (b) summer intensive CS experiences for high school teachers, (c) co-design of activities and lessons with teachers that bring issues of social and racial justice into their high school CS courses, and (d) adaptation and dissemination of curriculum that integrates technology, computational thinking, and career exposure into core required academic courses. Using mixed-methods approaches, the project will collect a rich set of data to examine how the project influences teacher learning (such as pedagogical content knowledge and self-efficacy) and student outcomes (such as AP Exam pass rates, attitudes, and post-graduation destinations). Results from this project will help discover how to support high school computer science teachers to offer high-quality computer science instruction that better engages students and improves student learning and impacts student future career paths.

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.