students, including students in rural areas and those who learn differently, in STEM education from pre-K through graduate studies. Her current work focuses on supporting and evaluating the construction of collaborative communities and building evaluation capacity within organizations and large-scale programs. In all efforts Adrienne works to (a) truly understand the purpose and needs for the evaluation or research undertaking, (b) develop feedback cycles that support continuous program improvement, (c) make implementation and impact data available and interpretable for program implementers, and (d) select the most rigorous, yet feasible analytic designs that are tailored to the unique needs of each program context. She
committed to increasing the number ofHispanics in all computing areas [4, 5, 6, 7].CAHSI focused much of its energy on retention and graduation efforts, and over the years itbecame known for certain proven practices, called signature practices, which consistentlydemonstrated to be beneficial for Hispanic students. Three of these signature practices are theAffinity Research Group (ARG) model, Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL), and Fellow-Net.The ARG model [8, 9, 10] is a set of practices built on a cooperative team framework imbuedwith cooperative-learning principles, which have been shown to increase student achievementand self-esteem [11, 12, 13]. ARG supports the creation and maintenance of dynamic andinclusive groups in which students learn and
children using different of engaging students of all ages, especially minorities andrepresentations and helps them to learn and practice traditionally excluded groups [3]. The target students for ourthe concepts using a “hands-on” approach. Further, use experiment are all African Americans and are amongst theof multiple representations supports the learning needs least likely to have access to and benefit from CS withoutof diverse learners, considering the grades and ages of intervention. Considering the ages of our population and thethe participants. Specifically, we present CS concepts to notion that CS concepts tend to be abstract, we employed astudents in three formats: 1) using