A Final Project Report on CS4Alabama: A Statewide Professional Development Initiative for CS Principles (Abstract Only)

This poster describes how this project has induced teacher preparation and broadened student participation in Computer Science Principles throughout Alabama from 2013-2016. We will describe our professional development (PD) model, gain for participating instructors, results of CS Principles course implementations, and student engagement and outcomes. A statewide and scalable "Teacher Leader" model of professional development was implemented throughout the project. In person training was coupled with on-line course content, geographically proximal teacher groups, and periodic teacher hangouts. Teachers in each cohort collaborated together on developing course content and pedagogy, fostered by peer leaders from earlier cohorts. Instructors encouraged and engaged their students; student agreed that the learning environments supported diversity. Students gained significantly in core computer science content (i.e., abstraction and algorithms) as well as computational thinking practices. Female students showed robust gains on a number of indicators (including higher course grades than males); under-represented minority students showed positive gains in content knowledge. The majority of students said they were likely or possibly likely to pursue computer science in college, and that taking CS Principles impacted their decisions.