EAGER: Shifting to Online Instruction for Math Teachers Teaching Computing

Brown University will explore how to enable math teachers to effectively teach computing online. Bootstrap is a national-scale outreach program that helps K-12 teachers integrate introductory computing into existing classes, such as math, physics, and social studies. Like many programs, Bootstrap has shifted to virtual professional development (PD) for Summer and Fall 2020. Its teachers are also preparing to teach with a combination of remote and socially-distanced instruction. For teachers with limited prior computing background, simultaneously learning and preparing to teach computing in a new (online) format demands significant cognitive overhead. Teachers must learn to effectively use programming tools, but also how to manage attention across these tools, lecture slides, digital worksheets (that would have been on paper for in-person learning), and potentially a videoconference session. With many learners (teachers and students) working on tablets or Chromebooks without external monitors or access to printers, the cognitive demands become considerable. This EAGER project explores how teachers in the integration context experience workload and develop non-cognitive dispositions that are known to impact the effectiveness of virtual PD in computing.

Brown University will seek to understand and mitigate the additional challenges that math teachers face when learning to integrate computing into their courses, both in virtual PD and in virtual teaching. Collected data will be largely qualitative, in the form of surveys, check-in questions embedded in PD sessions, interviews with teachers, and field observations during PD. Surveys will be designed to account for a variety of underlying factors, including cognitive task load, confidence, motivation, and interest. The project will result in case studies, findings about effective design of PD and instruction in virtual contexts, and curricular materials adapted for virtual instructional settings. Revised curricular materials will be freely available online. The assessments and materials will be designed for teachers in various situations, including those teaching remotely, those teaching in person but under student social-distancing, and those in rural areas, who have been requesting virtual PD independently of COVID. The latter, in particular, will make this work relevant even after in-person teaching and learning is able to resume.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.