Developing a Suite of Standards-based Instructionally Supportive Tools for Middle School Computer Science (ASSIST-MSCS) is a National Science Foundation-funded Early-Stage Design and Development project. In this five-year project (2020-2025), we designed a set of educative resources, instructionally supportive assessment tools, and teacher professional development workshops to support middle school computer science (CS) teachers’ understanding of CS standards in the ‘Algorithms and Programming’ strand of the CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards. Specifically, our teacher resources are aligned with five middle school CS standards on Algorithms, Variables, Control structures, Decomposition, and Procedures. In-service teacher participants enriched their CS content and pedagogical knowledge by 1) learning to identify evidence of student proficiency on the CS standards, 2) learning about common student challenges associated with the CS standards, and 3) gaining expertise in assessing and scaffolding students’ progress toward proficiency on the standards.
ASSIST-MSCS project activities unfolded in three phases:
- First, we designed and developed our educative resources and formative assessment tools for teachers. This phase included needs-sensing activities, extensive analysis of the middle school CS standards and well-known CS curricula and a review of known student challenges.
- Next, we facilitated teacher PD to help teachers use the standards-focused resources. We learned a lot from teachers in the course of these workshops about how to refine the PD model for future teacher cohorts.
- Finally, we studied the effects of the resources on CS teachers’ knowledge and classroom practices. Our findings have implications for teacher professional learning, curriculum design, and the role of standards in K-12 CS education.