Computer Science for All (CSforAll: Research and RPPs)

Overview

This program supports efforts that aim to provide opportunities for all students to participate in CS and CT learning at the pre-k, elementary, middle, and high school grade levels through research-practice partnerships (RPPs) that connect research to practice through long running and diverse collaborations. The program also supports traditional research that builds knowledge across educational pathways. Proposals are encouraged from teams in early stages of RPP formation, as well as advanced stages of RPP implementation. Proposals will be funded in four "strands" that collectively foster design, implementation at scale, and/or research:

• For the PreK-8 Strand, the focus is on designing, developing, and piloting instructional materials that integrate CS and/or CT into preK-8 classrooms.
• For the High School Strand, the focus is on preparing and supporting teachers to teach rigorous CS courses.
• For PreK-12 Pathways Strand, the focus is on designing pathways that support school districts in developing policies and supports for incorporating CS and/or CT across all grades and potentially the transition into introductory levels at community or four-year institutions of higher education and/or the workforce.
• For the Research Strand, the focus is on building strategically instrumental, or "high leverage" knowledge about the learning and teaching of introductory computer science to support key CS and/or CT understandings and abilities for all students.

Proposals in the PreK-8 Strand, High School Strand, and the Pathways Strand must involve RPPs, whereas proposals in the Research Strand are not subject to this requirement. A proposal can be submitted to only one strand, and that strand must be designated in the first line of the Project Summary.

To ensure that advances in computing education are inclusive of diverse student populations (the "for All" part of "CS for All"), proposals in any strand must address, in a significant manner, longstanding underrepresentation of many groups in computing relative to their participation in preK-12, postsecondary education, and the workforce (https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315). All proposals will be evaluated on the two additional Broadening Participation Criteria specific to this solicitation (see Section V.A, Project Description, below).

B. CSforAll RPP strands
RPPs require well-organized teams of researchers, PreK-12 practitioners (teachers, administrators, and counselors), and potentially other community, foundation, policy, and industry partners. There are many ways RPP teams can work together; however, central to the partnership is shared participation in rigorous research about problems of practice by all team members. Members of these teams work together to iteratively define and refine common goals, research questions, metrics, and implementations. RPPs vary across several dimensions, such as their goals, the composition of participating partners, and the approaches to and uses of research. However, they share a set of principles 3:

• They are long-term collaborations;
• They work toward educational improvement or equitable transformation;
• They feature engagement of research with practice as a leading activity; and
• They are intentionally organized to bring together a diversity of expertise.

RPPs aim to strengthen the capacity of an organization to reliably produce valued CS and CT education outcomes for diverse groups of students. The focus is on building efforts that can succeed when implemented at scale. RPPs involve a range of stakeholders in different stages of inquiry, and research findings from the field are translated into practical use, just as practical challenges can motivate articulation of solutions and subsequent sharing of those with the field.

1. PreK-8 Strand. RPPs proposed in this strand may address a wide range of topics on the teaching and learning of CS and CT in PreK-8 grades, including but not limited to:

• development and study of prototype instructional materials for PreK-8 both for stand-alone CS and CT courses or modules as well as teaching and testing of CS and CT concepts with other content;
• development of tools and models to support underrepresented students, including girls, in prekindergarten through elementary school in computer science education;
• creation of developmentally appropriate learning progressions that underlie the design of instructional materials;
• design of classroom-based assessments to inform teaching and learning along the way;
• development of professional development (PD) and teacher support — including face-to-face and online learning communities, coaching, and mentoring — as needed for piloting of instructional materials, along with research about their use and effectiveness;
• what and how teachers learn from professional development; and
• relationships between professional development activities and subsequent enactments of instruction.

RPPs focused on innovation in research and development of instructional materials for preK-8 are encouraged, and PIs should make a clear case that curricula and materials do not currently exist to address the teaching and learning of CS and CT in the relevant grade levels or cannot be adapted to those contexts. Strong proposals will document how the new curricula or instructional materials differ in significant ways from already available materials and tools.

2. High School Strand. As schools attempt to respond to the increasing demand for CS and CT in their curricula, they are often faced with a critical shortage of teachers. Proposals in this strand should address key issues in the preparation, professional development (PD), and ongoing support of teachers of high school CS, recognizing the need for quickly scaling effective efforts to reach teachers, many of whom have had little or no formal CS preparation. Additional issues include but are not limited to:

• recruitment of teachers;
• differential PD based on prior experiences;
• creating robust PD materials for teachers and facilitators;
• establishing online and hybrid PD approaches;
• assessing the effectiveness of PD models with respect to content knowledge, pedagogy, classroom equity, and student outcomes;
• adapting and scaling PD models for greater impact, especially with respect to inclusion and equity;
• establishing certification programs and pre-service paths for teacher PD;und
• ertaking studies to inform state or local policy about CS requirements; or
• designing, piloting and assessing scalable mechanisms for ongoing support of classroom teachers.

Whereas the focus of the High School Strand is RPPs conducting implementation and improvement research on teacher preparation and support, it is possible within a project to adapt or enhance instructional materials for high school students. PIs are encouraged to focus their RPPs on studying supports for teachers who are interested in using instructional materials that already have been developed and piloted and are now scaling nationally, such as Exploring Computer Science (ECS), curricula based on the Advanced Placement® (AP) Computer Science courses and exams, or Bootstrap, the curriculum for teaching mathematics and CS together. Proposals could develop and study curricula for integrating modules on artificial intelligence, machine learning, or data science into existing computer science courses.  Strong proposals will document the wide use of the proposed instructional materials with diverse students, include any available results about their effectiveness as part of the argument for focusing on the materials of choice, and will address how findings from the research will inform practitioners' choices about CS and/or CT materials.

3. PreK-12 Pathways Strand. Many districts have begun to make progress at the elementary, middle, and high school levels but need to coordinate the overall efforts, particularly to address articulation across the years of schooling. RPPs proposed in this strand may address the creation of pathways, including but not limited to:

• research and development of course sequences and alignment tools for students for PreK-12 Pathways at the school or district level;
• research and development of articulation from preK-12 Pathways to community or four-year colleges or universities in preparation for entry into CS or computationally intensive majors; or
• design and development of school, district, and/or state systems to assess and track student progress on pathways.

High-quality proposals in any of the above three RPP strands will:

• delineate clearly the CS/CT content to be taught;
• address working with communities that support the full spectrum of diverse computing talent, including the participation of groups that have been traditionally underrepresented or under-served in computing; demonstrating knowledge of the relevant literature on working with the identified communities, and providing concrete plans of action and clear metrics for documenting outcomes4;
• document the extent to which the approach has already scaled and its potential for further scaling;
• specify jointly-developed research questions and document the investment of the partners in those questions;
• provide work plans for implementation, improvement, data collection, analysis, and use; and
• draw from RPP literature on assessing/evaluating the quality of the partnership to articulate plans for assessing the success of the work of the RPP.

Projects in the RPP Strands above should provide research results or findings on one or more of the following:

• strategies for improvement or implementation that address a shared goal of the researcher/practitioner collaborators;
• conceptual frameworks that address issues of scale, human capacity, and technical support for implementation and improvement in educational systems;
• measures of organizational learning that assess the progress of implementation and improvement;
• sustainable communities that can support implementation and improvement in the identified educational system; and/or
• documented practices with an ongoing forum for continued engagement of collaborators from various levels of the educational system.

C. CSforAll Research Strand
The aim of the Research Strand is to support the development of evidence-based knowledge that illuminates how the teaching and learning of computing best occurs and how it can be supported most effectively for diverse students under different circumstances. Like the above three RPP strands, the Research Strand prioritizes a clear relationship between research and practice.

The Research Strand aims to enrich the knowledge base governing how students build on what and how they learn computing throughout their education pathway. Strong Research Strand proposals will support the participation of the full spectrum of diverse computing talent, including groups that have been traditionally underrepresented or under-served in computing relative to their participation in preK-14 education, with the research findings potentially contributing to the preparation of the future CS workforce (for national data, see: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315). Proposals should synthesize or demonstrate knowledge of the relevant literature that pertains to roots of underrepresentation, have a plan that explores ways of improving representation, and have clear metrics and methodologies for documenting outcomes that would test and inform that plan.

Areas of research should be considered broadly and can include but are not limited to: How students learn computer science or computational thinking as a literacy like reading and writing; How computational thinking can be supported and what developmental trajectories for CT look like; How computing competencies are learned in contexts of STEM disciplines; longitudinal impacts of computing education experiences in K-14, especially given advances like AI; How computational thinking development can be framed in ways that invite, value, and build on students' diverse cultural and linguistic resources; and What educators need to know and how they learn instructional abilities.

Strong proposals will bring to bear research expertise, approaches, and tools from scholarship on learning from other domains as appropriate, including but not limited to cognitive science, learning sciences, STEM education, social studies education, and ethics education.

D. CSforAll proposal size classes
The proposal size class should be specified in the first line of the Project Summary. Proposals in the three RPP strands may be submitted in the following size classes:

• Small RPP proposals (maximum of $300,000 for up to 2 years, plus funds for embedded Research Experiences for Undergraduates supplements) are designed to support initial steps in building a strong and well-integrated RPP team that could successfully compete for a Medium or Large proposal. These initial steps could include: establishing partnerships, exploratory research, and/or pilot implementation programs.
• Medium RPP proposals (maximum of $1,000,000 for up to 3 years, plus funds for embedded Research Experiences for Undergraduates supplements) are designed to support promising approaches and feasibility studies by a well-defined RPP team.
• Large RPP proposals (maximum of $2,000,000 for up to 4 years, plus funds for embedded Research Experiences for Undergraduates supplements) are designed to support the scaling of an evidence-based approach and implementation studies by an established RPP team that has demonstrated sustainability.

Research Strand proposals (maximum of $750,000 for up to 3 years, plus funds for embedded Research Experiences for Undergraduates supplements) are designed to support research projects that will contribute to the development of an evidence-informed knowledge base that illuminates how learning in the domain of computer science best occurs and how it can be supported most effectively for diverse students under different circumstances. As above, "Research Strand" should be specified in the first line of the Project Summary.

Proposals that do not comply with the requirements noted below by RWR will be returned without review. (RWR) All proposals must address evaluation plans.

(RWR) For Small RPP projects: The budget shown on the cover page and on the budget sheets must not exceed two years or $300,000, plus funds for embedded REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) supplements.

(RWR) For Medium RPP projects: The budget shown on the cover page and on the budget sheets must not exceed three years or $1,000,000, plus funds for embedded REU supplements.

(RWR) For Large RPP projects: The budget shown on the cover page and on the budget sheets must not exceed four years or $2,000,000, plus funds for embedded REU supplements.

(RWR) For Research projects: The budget shown on the cover page and on the budget sheets must not exceed three years or $750,000, plus funds for embedded REU supplements

Estimated Number of Awards: 27
Approximately 12-13 small Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs), 6 medium RPPs, 3 large RPPs, and 4-5 Research strand awards.
Anticipated Funding Amount: $20,000,000

Important Information And Revision Notes

The list of cognizant program officers has been updated.
The descriptions of Small RPP strand and Research strand projects have been updated.
Any proposal submitted in response to this solicitation should be submitted in accordance with the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) that is in effect for the relevant due date to which the proposal is being submitted.