2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Work in Progress Paper provides an update on the Secure and Upgrade Computer Science in Classrooms through an Ecosystem with Scalability & Sustainability (SUCCESS) project, an NSF-funded (#2031355) Computer Science (CS) educational Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) whose shared goal is to provide high quality CS educational opportunities to all middle school students in a rural area. SUCCESS brings together people, programs, knowledge, and resources to provide CS education and career counseling to students in these middle schools. RPPs are a novel method that uses research in local educational contexts to increase access to CS in areas that typically lack necessary resources. The SUCESS RPP is creating a CS course sequence that satisfies a West Virginia (WV) middle school career exploration requirement and supports districts in implementing CS education in their schools, thereby expanding CS opportunities for rural students. Core RPP members are West Virginia University (WVU) Center for Excellence in STEM Education (CE-STEM), West Virginia University Beckley campus (WVU-B), the Raleigh County School District, the West Virginia Department of Education, and Code.org.
The SUCCESS RPP partnership first convened at a summer 2021 workshop, where middle school-level “design teams” including teachers, principals and counselors were formed. These teams worked with district and university SUCCESS senior personnel to modify the most widely used CS curriculum in the world (Code.org) and understand how the RPP would use data obtained from partners and students of participating teachers. Data collected are used to provide and iteratively improve culturally responsive development (PD) and other supports to additional state districts in summer 2022 and 2023. In this paper, we provide an update of the impact of the project to date on numbers of teachers, counselors, and principals, and the number/percent of students who have taken the adapted CS course for each participating school, as well as challenges and how project personnel adapted the project to address these challenges. The RPP approach and our results can benefit anyone working to increase access to high-quality CS education at the K-12 levels.