A Rural Education Model to Increase Engagement and Learning in STEM using a Community-Relevant Computer Science Curriculum

About This Grant

Learning materials that align with students’ lived experiences and that are relevant to the challenges and issues that confront their communities have been shown to improve student engagement and learning outcomes. Yet, students in rural spaces often find themselves taught through lessons and curricular materials not directly relevant to, or seemingly counter to, their lived experience. This project seeks to co-develop and implement a locally relevant and integrated computer science curriculum that centers the lived experiences of rural Hawaiian students and communities. It is hypothesized that understanding and engaging local educational needs creates opportunities for students to learn in ways that make schooling meaningful and relevant to their experiences, culture, community, identity. These impacts will increase interest, belonging and pursuit of STEM coursework and careers. Using a mixed methods approach, researchers and educators will work together to iteratively co-design and evaluate curricular materials that center Hawaiian students’ experiences and sense of community to support youth in developing strong connections to STEM learning that foster their future engagement and interest in STEM. Before, during, and after co-design activities, the research team will directly observe interactions amongst teachers and students during instructional time. As implementation, design, and refinement of the curriculum proceeds, the research team will leverage interview, focus group, and observational data collection from multiple stakeholders (i.e., school administrators, staff, teachers, students, and parents of students), to develop survey items. These items reflect distinct perspectives on what schooling and school success are and should be, the perceived value of and interest in future opportunities associated with Computer Science, s well as the level of empowerment and inclusion experienced. The surveys will be administered 3 times per year. The team will initially conduct exploratory factor analyses on the responses to establish a tentative factor structure that links the meanings for items held by stakeholders within the community to broader concepts. As those components stabilize within groups across the three deployments of the first full academic year (Fall, Y1-Spring Y2), analyses will move to a confirmatory factor analytic framework to validate the within-group measurement structure, moving next to assessing measurement invariance between groups and across time. The results of this study will allow the team to develop an evidence-based, transferable model of curriculum development that centers the experiences of local students to meet the educational needs of rural communities. Further, the team will develop locally responsive measures of educational success, student sense of belonging, and agency in schooling to gauge its development in context over three years of middle school and to ascertain impacts of materials developed using this model for rural curricular development. The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.  This project is also supported through the Computer Science for All: Research and RPPs program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.