Asee peer logo

Comparing Access and Participation Outcomes of Schools Engaged in a Multi-school CS and Cybersecurity Intervention (Evaluation)

Download Paper |

Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

Pre-College Engineering Education Technical Session 7: Cybersecurity and Computing

Page Count

17

DOI

10.18260/1-2--41065

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/41065

Download Count

362

Paper Authors

biography

Monica McGill CSEdResearch.org

visit author page

Dr. Monica McGill is the Founder, President, and CEO of CSEdResearch.org, a 501(c)(3) non-profit focused on improving K-12 Computer Science education for all children by enabling and disseminating exemplary, evidence-driven research.

visit author page

author page

Leigh Ann DeLyser

author page

Stephanie Wortel-London

author page

Angelica Thompson

author page

Eric Snow

author page

Luronne Vaval

Download Paper |

Abstract

In early 2020, a cohort of 30 high schools engaged in a year-long intervention designed to increase their ability to offer Computer Science (CS) and Cybersecurity education to their students. After we performed an evaluation on the intervention’s impacts, we turned our attention to whether or not the outcomes were influenced by engagement of the schools in the cohort. In this research paper, we focus on the guiding research question: How do schools’ engagement in an intervention designed to build equitable CS and Cybersecurity education capacity impact schools’ course offerings and students’ participation in these courses?

To measure equitable impact, we evaluated changes to actual CS and Cybersecurity course offerings and enrollment at the schools. We focused on the differences in participation across student gender and race/ethnicity as well as participation levels at the different schools across three years prior to the intervention and one year after the intervention.

Findings indicate that, despite the disruption to schools from the COVID-19 pandemic, schools engaged in the program had very significant increases in AP CSP, AP CS A, and Cybersecurity course offerings and enrollment, particularly at schools that serve students from low-income families.

McGill, M., & DeLyser, L. A., & Wortel-London, S., & Thompson, A., & Snow, E., & Vaval, L. (2022, August), Comparing Access and Participation Outcomes of Schools Engaged in a Multi-school CS and Cybersecurity Intervention (Evaluation) Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41065

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2022 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015