Castro, B., Diaz, T., Gee, M., Justice, R., Kwan, D., Seshadri, P., & Dodds, Z. (2016, February). MyCS at 5: Assessing a Middle-years CS Curriculum. In Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education (SIGCSE '15)(pp. 558-563), Memphis, TN: ACM.

Summary

Type: Empirical

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is share the results on a five-year development of the MyCS curriculum for students in grades 4th through 10th. This paper shares how the MyCS curriculum is reaching more diverse student ethnicities, supports for teachers in building confidence in this CS curriculum, and detailing the impact of MyCS between students who took MyCS course and a control group.

Findings: 1. "All students taking the MyCS or not, increased their personal positive affiliations with computing over the past year" (p. 559) 2. Female students expressed a significantly more positive computational identity 3. Males has taken MyCS to a larger extent than female (p. 560) 4. After PD workshops, teachers have gained significantly in confidence with computing 5. 58% of teachers who attended the PD workshop integrated some amount of MyCS in their classroom 6. "The MyCS had reached larger proportion of students from racial and ethnic groups underrepresented in postsecondary CS" (p. 560)

Recommendations:

Methodology

Sample Size: 5475

Participant Type: Of students surveyed, 613 took a class that included MyCS curriculum and the control group of 3360 were in classes with little or no computational content. The remaining 1502 were in classes that utilized MyCS curriculum but were not included in the comparative results. Students population: Female in control 1603 (47.7%) and MyCS 263(42.9%) and Male in control 1757 (52.3%) and MyCS 350(57.1%)

Notes: White: Control group=559 (10.7%) and MyCS group=59 (9.6%) African American: Control= 67(2.0%) and MyCS group=26(4.2%) Asian: Control=310(9.2%) and MyCS group=32(5.2%) Latina/o: Control=1689(50.3%) and MyCS group=386(63.0%) Native American: Control=46(1.4%) and MyCS=9(1.5%) Multiracial: Control=461(13.7%) and MyCS group=22(3.6%) Other: Control=429(12.8%) and MyCS=79(12.9%)