A Tool for Mapping CS Education Access Components to Factors That Influence Academic Achievement (Poster 10)

• In Event: Moving Toward Just and Equitable Access to Computing Education

Abstract

Numerous factors have been identified that contribute to K-12 students’ academic achievement (Farrington, Roderick, Allensworth, Nagaoka, Keyes, Johnson, & Beechum, 2012; Hattie & Yates, 2013; Irvine, 2020; Lee & Shute, 2010). When considering the four broad components of CAPE (Fletcher & Warner, 2021), access has been examined to various degrees. Historically, the most data about access to CS education has been available about AP CS courses (CS A and CS Principles), though many states are now starting to collect and track data for all CS related courses (Code.org, CSTA & ECEP Alliance, 2022). Dimensions of access can be related to school contextual factors such as public or private status, Title I designation, urbanicity (rural, town, suburban, urban), and course admission policies (e.g. complete Algebra I, minimum GPA, class standing).

However, what isn’t always clear is what comprises access and how it translates to influencing factors. We recently conducted a systematic mapping review (Papaioannou, Sutton, & Booth, 2016) of K-12 CS education literature using a deductive coding technique. After creating an a priori book of factors based on previous research findings that identified factors contributing to academic achievement (Farrington et al, 2012; Irvine, 2020; McGill & Decker, 2017), we grouped these factors into Capacity (69 factors), Access (12 factors), Participation (4 factors), or Experience (84 factors). We then conducted a systematic mapping review of K-12 CS education research articles published 2019-2021 (𝑛 = 196) from publicly available data from the K-12 CS Education Research Resource Center (McGill & Decker, 2017).

As a result of this analysis, we found an additional 16 factors that have been studied that relate specifically to Access. We then created a comprehensive book of all 28 factors for the Access component within the educational ecosystem for CS. We grouped the Access factors into three subcomponents (Community-based Activities, Curriculum Offerings, and School-based Extracurricular Activities), as shown in Figure 1. Our analysis found 46 articles that investigated Access to Curriculum Offerings, four articles that studied Community-based Activities, and one article studying School-based Extracurricular activities. The most frequent Access category investigated in our study is Curriculum Offerings → Integrated CS (𝑛 = 23), followed by Curriculum offerings → Types (𝑛 = 21). Several factors were not investigated at all in our corpus of literature, including Community-based Activities → Availability, Curriculum Offerings → Course Fees, and School-based Extracurricular Activities → Scheduling.

These factors and their definitions are now publicly accessible. This framing provides researchers with an easy-to-use tool for categorizing and comparing factors within the Access component of the CAPE framework.

Authors

• Isabella Gransbury, North Carolina State University

• Monica McGill, Institute for Advancing Computing Education

• Julie M. Smith, Institute for Advancing Computing Education