Projects

CS4ALL

Engaging students in a scaffolded exploration of CS concepts using multiple programming platforms and providing adaptations for students with disabilities for fully participation) — design and implement CS4ALL research and evaluation components in collaboration with the project team.

Building Professional Identity as Computer Science Teachers: Supporting Secondary Computer Science Teachers through Reflection and Community Building

Quality computing education requires quality computing teachers. Much recent literature on teacher education highlights the importance of identity in teacher development, which suggests that a strong sense of teacher identity is a major indicator or feature of committed quality teachers. However, for computer science (CS) education, the current system does not provide typical contexts for teachers to build a sense of professional identity as CS teachers. Teachers teaching CS courses do not necessarily identify themselves as CS teachers. This thesis work investigates the sense of identity high school CS teachers hold and explores ways of supporting their identity development through a professional development program (DCCE) with a major focus on community building and teacher reflection.

Developing Regional Communities of Computing Educators: The Disciplinary Commons for Computing Educators (DCCE)

The DCCE is an NSF funded project, aimed at developing a statewide community of computing educators, who hold common interests in computing education and goals of making innovations in computing education. We invite college or university instructors who teach introductory CS, along with high school CS teachers, especially AP CS teachers to participate in the DCCE for a period of one year. During this year, teachers discuss their own teaching practice, undertake peer observation and peer review, investigate their own classroom practice or document their own teaching through shared production of course portfolios. We've explored different strategies to promote teacher reflection and community building among local computing educators each year. More about DCCE can be found at the DCCE cohort sites.

DCCE Cohort Sites
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What Makes Computer Science Teachers Change?
Factors that Influence Computer Science Teachers' Adoption and Change

To make computing curriculum innovations have real impact on student learning, it is critical to understand what factors are most important for shaping the way(s) that our innovations are adopted, adapted, and implemented by CS teachers. This study is intended to understand what makes teachers change the way they teach computing. I first investigated factors influencing computing faculty's decisions on whether to adopt a new CS curriculum, who participated in workshops on several innovative introductory CS courses at Georgia Tech. I then conducted a follow-up study tracking these participants' adoption experience, to elicit the extent to which instructors adopted or adapted what they learned from the workshops and factors facilitated or prevented their adoption.

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Adopting Assessment Tools for Media Computation Courses

We are happy to help teachers teaching Media Computation courses or related introductory CS courses adopt instruments to assess their own courses. I've collected those instruments used at Georgia Tech and created supportive information for teachers who are interested in adopting/adapting these tools.