Building Student Retention through Individuated Guided Cohort Training in Computer Science Research-Practitioner Partnership

There is a severe underrepresentation of black women in computing, explained by educational barriers that black girls face in the K-12 education system even before reaching postsecondary education. Middle grades are a critical transition point for students, where achievement gaps and interest in STEM-CS widen over time. This project, a Researcher-Practitioner Partnership (RPP), is a two-year project that will engage teachers, school leaders, guidance counselors, and researchers to identify barriers and future work in the areas of structural, instructional, and curricular improvements in middle schools to promote more black girls to gain interest and experience in computer science. Some of the core members of the team are developing a computer science learning ecosystem for middle school black girls, called BRIGHT-CS, that includes summer and school based programming. This project is an extension of the BRIGHT-CS project to engage teachers in an RPP to create an inclusive environment to promote CS interest and learning among black girls in their schools. While the core team has had implicit support from schools in the community, there is an exigent need to explicitly engage teachers, guidance counselors, and school leaders to further support an inclusive environment where black girls can thrive at school. The project rests on the foundation that issues of diversity and inclusivity, and broadening participation in computer science specifically, must be systematic, persistent, and ongoing work within the teaching community. Further, the RPP addresses issues around identifying and rectifying barriers in the school that will promote an inclusive school environment that will benefit all students including other marginalized students.

Through the RPP, the project will establish professional learning communities (PLCs) in three middle schools that includes researchers, guidance counselors, teachers and school leaders. The RPP will support the initial steps in addressing why there are so few black girls interested and pursuing computer science in the middle grades. Rather than speaking in general terms, or looking at national trends, the RPP will look specifically at the three schools and classroom data to conduct an equity audit on the structural, instructional, and curricular barriers that black girls face in their school. The result will be a PLC logic model and a research agenda for future RPP proposals.

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.