CS Proficiency: Closing the Achievement Gap in Los Angeles

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An early foundation in CS and coding is a “new basic” skill set “necessary for economic opportunity and social mobility” (CS for All, 2016) but coding is increasingly recognized for its ability to develop student problem solving skills, applicable across STEM domains. Researchers at UC Davis have concluded that K-12 CS education can help address California’s achievement gap in math (Cheng, 2016). This gap is especially significant for students of color in Los Angeles (LAUSD) and Compton Unified (CUSD) schools, where only 20% & 17% of African American 6th grade students met the 2018 SBA Math standards.

9 Dots is dedicated to CS education equity for low income students, girls, and students of color. This means going beyond CS “exposure” to close both the access and the achievement gap for underrepresented students by demonstrating meaningful student outcomes. California adopted K-12 CS standards in 2018, but there are still no standardized K-6 CS proficiency measures (Code.org, 2017).

9 Dots’ Get Coding program serves 22 LAUSD and CUSD Title I schools with K-6 CS education, from unplugged activities to an introduction to JavaScript and other professional coding languages. Our original, standards aligned curriculum is accessible via our online Platform which is designed to capture basic student proficiency, interest, and motivation data, delivering key learning insights into every classroom.

9 Dots also conducts formal research. Funded by the National Science Foundation and in collaboration with UCLA, our current project is “Programming as a Context for Making Problem Solving Visible: An Equity Focused K-5 Research Practice Partnership.” Classroom observations and interviews have revealed the central role of problem solving in how teachers conceptualize and value coding. In response to our findings, 9 Dots has begun to “operationalize” the problem solving process more explicitly, developing curriculum challenge “tags” associated with core coding concepts and skills.

Direct Impact: 8,320

Indirect Impact: 10,420

9 Dots’ project will provide a model for a more rigorous definition of K-6 CS proficiency. Our hope is to increase understanding of not only how to measure proficiency in a meaningful way but what to measure in order to capture progress towards cognitive skills development that can help close the STEM achievement gap for underrepresented students.

The first of the Standards for Mathematical Practice, “Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them” is highly aligned with learning outcomes associated with debugging. Capturing and extracting student debugging and problem solving proficiency at our partner schools will allow us to initiate longitudinal explorations of possible correlations with SBA Math problem solving area performance.

9 Dots currently measures proficiency by tracking students’ successful completion of challenges in our curriculum and in our Level Up Challenge assessments, with a 75% rating considered proficient. Our goal is to define and measure our proficiency score to better represent learning achievements in terms of a) specific attainments of coding skills with defined difficulty levels, but also b) measurable demonstration of the computational and problem solving skills set out in each lesson’s scope & sequence and applicable across STEM domains.

By tagging each coding challenge for specific concepts, difficulty level, and problem solving strategy, we will have the capacity to run complex proficiency analyses on student completion data and gain profound insights into what our students are learning. Core coding concepts include Loops, Functions, Conditionals, and Sequencing. Difficulty measures include coding skill complexity but also the approach the student is required to take, i.e. is the problem highly scaffolded or is it open ended, requiring students to apply what they have learned to create their own solution. Problem solving processes necessary to complete each challenge may include Pattern Recognition, Abstracting, Decomposing, Refactoring, and Debugging.

Our vision for success is one where every student in Los Angeles has access to a transformative CS education with measurable outcomes. We envision rigorous and joyful coding classrooms where students who have previously fallen behind or felt they did not belong in a STEM class are engaged; can demonstrate achievements that extend across subjects; and become creative and fearless learners who can persevere when facing difficult problems.

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