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State Case Study of Computing Education Governance

Published: 16 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

High school computing education reform efforts have been ongoing across the United States, particularly in the past decade. Although national Computer Science (CS) for All initiatives are promising, states retain control over education policies. Recent computing education reform efforts in the state of Maryland (U.S.A.) focused on providing every public high school student with access to high-quality high school computing courses. Such access provides exposure to computing careers and better prepares a diverse pool of students for computing majors in college and the workforce. This comprehensive embedded multi-level case study examines the state’s computing education reform efforts from 2010 through 2016. The expansion of computing education indicates that while there was positive growth, the growth was not the same for all categories of public high school students. Top-down policies assist in providing leverage to elevate the need for CS; however, bottom-up efforts to support students and to enable teachers to retain autonomy and professionalism is also needed for CS expansion. Despite successes, barriers at the state, Local Education Agencies (LEA), school, and classroom levels persist and are discussed. The findings in this study can be applied to other states with similar governance structures and policies, and we provide specific recommendations.

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  • (2024)Advancing Equity and Access: Addressing the Side Effects of Broadening Participation in Computer Science K–12 EducationReview of Research in Education10.3102/0091732X24128647548:1(121-153)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Computing Education
ACM Transactions on Computing Education  Volume 19, Issue 4
Special Section on ML Education and Regular Articles
December 2019
297 pages
EISSN:1946-6226
DOI:10.1145/3345033
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 July 2019
Accepted: 01 March 2019
Revised: 01 March 2019
Received: 01 September 2018
Published in TOCE Volume 19, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. Computer science education
  2. K-12 computing education
  3. broadening participation in computing education
  4. computing education reform

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Advancing Equity and Access: Addressing the Side Effects of Broadening Participation in Computer Science K–12 EducationReview of Research in Education10.3102/0091732X24128647548:1(121-153)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Situating Equity in Education Policy to Advance Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC)Proceedings of the 2024 on RESPECT Annual Conference10.1145/3653666.3656101(107-115)Online publication date: 16-May-2024
  • (2024)Exploring Barriers and Strategies to boost Scientific Output in Computing Education in Africa: Early InsightsProceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3649217.3653588(736-742)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Understanding U.S. secondary computer science teachers’ challenges and needsComputer Science Education10.1080/08993408.2023.2209474(1-33)Online publication date: 4-May-2023
  • (2022)How to change a state: Broadening participation in K-12 computer science educationPolicy Futures in Education10.1177/14782103221123363Online publication date: 2-Sep-2022
  • (2020)Maximizing BPC Through Maryland's Annual State Summits2020 Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT)10.1109/RESPECT49803.2020.9272416(1-4)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2020

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