Hi Michael. The issue of instructional time is a real challenge. Because teachers are responsible for covering their district-mandated curriculum and for the assessments that follow, so finding time for anything new is difficult. That's one of the reasons that we are focused on integration. We are also mindful of how much time the CS/CT activities take and are doing our best to offer ways of keeping within the designated times of the traditional math curriculum. We definitely haven't come up with a perfect solution, but our pilot testing next year will hopefully help us better understand the time/instructional rigor/balance of math and CSCT issues. 

Hi Nadine. This is a really important question regarding teacher buy-in. In this stage of our project, we are working with teachers who opt into the project so that we can answer questions regarding integration and student learning broadly. I can tell you, however, that many of the teachers who we approach are quite excited about the project and the possibilities of computational thinking enhancing learning and engagement for all their learners. Pre-work typically involves a great deal of relationship and trust building. We meet with the teachers and administrators, answer questions, offer to help, etc. We have worked with reluctant teachers, but that reluctance is often concern about expertise, resources, etc. For example, some of the reluctant teachers that we started working with in 2012 are some of our teacher leaders at this point. These are the teachers that we have learned the most from because the capacity building that occurs with them can translate into our professional development and resources. 

Thanks Karen. We picked fractions as the focus of this project for a couple of reasons: (1) We wanted to have a narrow enough focus to be able to measure differences in student learning, and (2) fractions are really difficult for many students. In terms of which CT practices work best with which math content, this is part of the intellectual work of this project. In our exploratory project, we did a great deal of looking at the literature to try to develop learning trajectories for CT. Now, in the context of math instruction, we are having to re-evaluate those progressions because they are not always a natural fit. For example, in our meeting with our advisory board this week, we talked about how in Scratch, negative numbers and variables can be used fairly naturally by young learners, but these are addressed much later in the math standards. We are documenting these "fit" issues along the way and are hoping to share them once we gain a better understanding through both continued discussions with our advisors as well as small micr-studies.

Thanks for these great questiions. (1) For this study, we are focusing on the 3rd-5th grade fractions progression. We are currently working heavily on content for 3rd and 4th grades. (2) All of our current learning trajectories and sample lessons are on our website in the resource tab: http://everydaycomputing.org/public/resource/. (3) I wish we were looking at longitudinal data across years, but in 2019-2020, we will have a pre/post with control study looking at math performance tied to fractions as that is the area of instruction we are focused on. We are not yet at the point where we think we will move the needle on a broad, standardized assessment given the narrow scope of the study. However, we are working closely with the assessment experts on our team (Jim Pellegrino and Brian Gane) who are helping us develop and use valid measures of student learning. Assessment is a huge area of focus for our project. We will share these assessment practices as the project progresses. 

The effort in Champaign is a combination of math coaches and multi-subject teachers. Maya can better talk about the background of those teachers. In Champaign, they've reached critical mass such that many of the teachers are interested at a particular school. So I think you have to play the long game - get the very excited ones first, make sure your PD is very accessible to teacher with no experience, have a set of projects that are engaging and clearly math-oriented but don't have strict assessments that the teachers worry about on the CT side, then build up that exploratory, supportive atmosphere. As teachers gain more experience and confidence in themselves, then you can gradually improve the quality of the instruction and the percentage of teachers participating. It's a tough problem, though!

In Chicago, we're finding a wide variety of interest levels. I have several projects going, and teachers appear to be most interested in the CS-only activities, followed by CS+Math, followed by instructional strategies that can be integrated into everything. So I think the math is a little intimidating, but we think our activities are structured really well to be accessible - we'll find out in PD!

On the mathematics side, we will be drawing form Everyday Mathematics unit tests on fractions, though we may modify those a little bit (because some of them are designed to identify students who are very behind rather than elucidate the depth of learning for students who are on track). On the computational thinking side, we have teamed up with Jim Pellegrino and Brian Gane at UIC to design CT assessments. They are designed to target the elements of the Computational Thinking learning trajectories that we're covering and be similar in nature to the activities the children will do.

You can read about the development of our LTs in our paper, including both the sources and the theoretical frameworks we used:

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3106166

And here's more about the literature from which we drew for the LTs:

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3017772