Caitlin K. Martin

Analyzing educators’ online interactions: a framework of online learning support roles

While the potential benefits of participating in online learning communities are documented, so too are inequities in terms of how different populations access and use them. We present the online learning support roles (OLSR) framework, an approach using both automated analytics and qualitative interpretation to identify and explore online teaching roles. We analyze the OLSR using data logs of iRemix, the online component of the Digital Youth Network, a face-to-face and online program for urban youth in underserved communities. In three middle-school classrooms, six educators used iRemix most to interact with individual students, especially as a window into their work. Although many roles were documented, few were played regularly, raising questions about design and intentionality. To address participation inequities, our results suggest that the OLSR and related data can be used to support productive practice improvement conversations among educators and to inform the design of online social learning networks.

Interest and the Development of Pathways to Science

In this chapter we review two lines of work that trace the ways interest in science is triggered in everyday activity and then, once triggered, is extended and deepened. We take an ecological view of interest development, exploring social, cognitive, cultural, and material resources that contribute to a pathway from interest to disciplinary expertise and engagement. The chapter brings together two complementary lines of empirical work. In the first line of work, Crowley, Knutson, and colleagues conducted 2-hour retrospective life-history interviews with adult scientists and engineers asking about their early disciplinary interests and the ways those interests developed and were supported throughout life. In the second line of work, Barron, Martin, and colleagues prospectively followed youth engaged in science and technology to identify ways their interests were supported and extended across everyday, informal, and formal boundaries. We first present examples from each of these two lines of work, and then a cross-study synthesis that points to new questions about interest development. Our findings suggest that individual interests in science often emerge before high school, and as learners become passionate about a particular interest, they increasingly seek out and create opportunities to learn by engaging parents and peers, taking on new projects, enrolling in programs or visiting informal learning settings, and/or pursuing resources in books or online.

Assisting and assessing the development of technological fluencies: insights from a project-based approach to teaching computer science

University-school partnerships hold great promise for establishing innovative computer-science curricula and investigating how students learn and appropriate technologies for their own use. Here we highlight an interdisciplinary design work and describe a novel approach to the assessment of student growth.

Creating Within and Across Life Spaces: The Role of a Computer Clubhouse in a Child’s Learning Ecology

The clubhouse environment described above has its origins in concerns about equitable access to tools, people, and ideas that support the development of technological fluency—defined generally as the capacity to express oneself using a broad range of computing tools (Resnick & Rusk, 1996) and to adapt technology to advance one’s own goals. Digital technologies offer children and adolescents rich opportunities to design and create artwork, movies, games, animations, interactive robots, and other artifacts. Online communities that reflect “cultures of participation” (Jenkins, 2006, 2009) allow creators to share their work, receive feedback, and expand their social networks. Informal collaborative relationships develop as learners share knowledge and codevelop interests. It has been suggested that participation in these informal collectives nurtures important twenty-first-century capacities such as collaboration, knowledge of how to build social networks, manage information, direct one’s own learning, engage in design, and capitalize on opportunities for distributed cognition and the building of collective intelligence. Design activities, including information gathering, creative thinking, prototyping, improvisation, and tinkering, are thought to provide potential pathways to these crucial twenty-first-century capacities (Balsamo, 2010).

Digital Youth Divas: Exploring Narrative-Driven Curriculum to Spark Middle School Girls' Interest in Computational Activities.

Women use technology to mediate numerous aspects of their professional and personal lives. Yet, few design and create these technologies given that women, especially women of color, are grossly underrepresented in computer science and engineering courses. Decisions about participation in STEM are frequently made prior to high school, and these decisions are impacted by prior experience, interest, and sense of fit with community. Digital Youth Divas is an out-of-school program that uses narrative stories to launch the creation of digital artifacts and support non-dominant middle school girls’ STEM interests and identities through virtual and real-world community. In this article, we discuss the framework of the Digital Youth Divas environment, including our approach to blending narratives into project-based design challenges through on- and offline mechanisms. Results from our pilot year, including the co-design process with the middle school participants, suggest that our narrative-centered, blended learning program design sparks non-dominant girls’ interests in STEM activities and disciplinary identification, and has the potential to mediate girls’ sense of STEM agency, identities, and interests.

Citizen Science: Connecting to Nature Through Networks

Citizen science projects represent an important example of mass collaboration at a global scale where nonscientists can contribute to science research across geographical locations. To more broadly and deeply capitalize on the potential for citizen science to invigorate inquiry-based science at school, we need to better understand how and why citizen science opportunities are taken up by particular teachers. In this chapter, we offer a framework for the analysis of conditions that influence voluntary participation in citizen science efforts. The framework is developed with empirical data from a longitudinal case study. The framework focuses on four dimensions that contributed sustained and evolving participation: (1) alignment between the citizen science opportunity with personal interests and teaching goals, (2) access to a networked community with curricular resources and a technical infrastructure, (3) an integrated indoor and outdoor classroom space that promoted place-based inquiry opportunities, and (4) a set of collaborative practices and networked opportunities that created conditions for an expanding set of partnerships. We close with a discussion of how the design of the socio-technical dimensions of citizen science efforts might be informed by both ethnographic and quantitative studies.

Continuing motivation for game design

In this paper we share experiences from a 2-week game-design project using the introductory programming environment AgentSheets with middle school students (6-8 grades) during a summer computing course at a public middle school in northern California. We examine factors that influence students. desire to continue working with the software, looking at similarities and differences between boys and girls, students with high or low levels of prior experience, and variables which we hypothesize might contribute to continuing motivation. Our findings suggest that programming in the context of game design can be of interest to a broad range of students, not only those who already are engaged in technological activities.

Beyond Traditional Metrics: Using Automated Log Coding to Understand 21st Century Learning Online

While log analysis in massively open online courses and other online learning environments has mainly focused on traditional measures, such as completion rates and views of course content, research is responding to calls for analytic frameworks that are more reflective of social learning models. We introduce a generalizable approach to automatically code log data that highlights educator support roles and student actions that are consistent with recent conceptualizations of 21st century learning, such as creative production, self-directed learning, and social learning. Here, we describe details of a log-coding framework that builds from prior mixed method studies of the use of iRemix, an online social learning network, by middle school youth and adult educators in blended learning contexts.

Uncovering barriers to participation through mapping citywide computing opportunities in Chicago: What do we mean by access?

Unequal access to quality learning opportunities is a key issue that shapes who is able to participate in computing relevant communities and jobs [1]. Although many educators, government officials, and business professionals acknowledge the need to provide computer science education to all youth, access to computing opportunities is still limited [2]. Understanding the current state of available learning opportunities is an initial step in addressing gaps, barriers, and unequal access. In this poster we present our in-progress mapping of the computer science ecosystem in the city of Chicago. As we present the landscape we ask: How accessible are the educational opportunities for youth in Chicago, particularly youth who are traditionally underrepresented in computing careers. The barriers to participation revealed through our mapping process include transportation, the time schedules of programs, and the lack of opportunities for elementary youth. Our findings suggest that in order to broaden participation in computing there is a need to 1) increase the number of local computing opportunities, and 2) to create opportunities that acknowledge the realities facing low-income and working class households, realities that include child care constraints, rigid work schedules, and limited disposable income.

Developing focused recruitment strategies to engage youth in informal opportunities

Despite increasing jobs predicted in the areas of engineering and computer science, there is a well-documented and consistent drop in the number of women in these fields at each level of advancement, and these trends are even more profound for minority women [1]. Decisions about participation are frequently made prior to high school, and have been linked to factors such as prior experience, interest, and sense of fit with community [2]. Out-of-school time has been identified as a potential space for STEM-related programming that breaks free of traditional models [3], and there is evidence of learning and engagement outcomes from such programs serving underrepresented populations [4]. However, programs that happen out of school are often voluntary, presenting very real challenges of recruiting and retention. Inequities have been identified in student participation in out-of-school STEM programming, with males and dominant populations being more likely to access such opportunities (e.g. [5]). To truly broaden participation, we need to not only design quality programs, but also work to develop and understand recruiting strategies that can encourage young people and families who are not already engaged to participate. The specifics of such efforts, even for programs that have been successful in recruiting, are often undocumented [6]. In this poster, we attend specifically to the critical question of how to recruit young women from underrepresented populations who do not see themselves as engineers and computational thinkers to participate in opportunities that could spark interest, broaden social learning networks, and lead to the pursuit of further learning. The Digital Divas program invites inner-city middle school girls interested in fashion and design to develop e-textiles and try out introductory programming during out-of-school time. In this poster we share program recruitment strategies from two Digital Divas implementations, spring and summer, and compare participants in terms of general demographics, identity, and confidence with technology. Both implementations were successful in recruiting minority girls from around Chicago. Summer implementation, which followed a redesign of recruiting methods, evidenced participants who were additionally aligned with the programs target population: girls who signed up for the summer program had less access to computing opportunities at home and school and less incoming engagement and confidence with computer science and engineering than spring participants. This work points to the importance of attending to strategies and materials for recruitment. Summer recruitment materials had less emphasis on technical language, more on design and creation; had more images of girls and their projects, reflecting diversity of participants; highlighted solutions to potential barriers, including low cost, lunch, and nearby public transport; and were strategically shared through online networks. Recommendations for strategies include: (1) close attention to language and imagery to engage families from non-dominant populations; (2) redundant, targeted, channels of distribution, utilizing online networks and local organizations.