Next Door to Silicon Valley: A Research-Practitioner Partnership to Address Disparities in Access and Expectations for Computer Science Education

Funder: National Science Foundation

ETR Team: Jill Denner and Emily Green

This project is a collaboration between ETR, Santa Cruz City Schools, and the Santa Cruz Education Foundation. It will build a research-practitioner partnership to address the question: How do we reduce the disparity in students’ access to quality opportunities to learn computer science (CS) and computational thinking (CT) and ongoing support to persist in computer science?

The activities will include a teacher-lead CS Committee that will design a 3rd-8th grade CS progression, teacher professional development, a system to leverage parent and community resources and support to sustain CS education, and data collection and analysis to monitor learning progressions and systems change.

This work is part of a larger national movement to use research-practitioner partnerships as a model to foster the research and development needed to bring CS and CT to all students.