Finding the Right “Look”: Charting the Capacity of “Look For” Documents to Discern CT Integration in Elementary and Middle School Classrooms 
Kelly Mills, Pati Ruiz, & Quinn Burke

According to the national non-profit Code.org, to date, a total of thirty-five states have enacted computer science (CS) standards for their K-12 public schools. Meanwhile, nine more states are in the process of developing statewide CS and digital literacy (DL) standards (Code.org, 2019). Yet while the national push for computing in all U.S. schools is an admirable goal (and has seen gains nearly unimaginable ten years ago), there is still serious debate to what extent classrooms are enacting substantial computing on the elementary and middle school levels. The call for computational thinking (CT) has galvanized educators and researchers to increasingly integrate computing into existing subjects, but the sheer range of activities and subject matter has made it fundamentally difficult to understand what computing looks like and how it builds upon itself across the grade bands. Based on a three-year NSF CSforAll grant entitled “CT Pathways”, this proposed session presents the use of “Look For” documents to assess CT integration and as a self-reflective measure that teachers can use to gauge their own understanding on key CT competencies and their capacity to enact these with their middle school students. Come join your colleagues at this session as we discuss the impetus for developing 6-8 “Look For” documents among three unique school districts (one urban, one rural, and one suburban), as well as discuss the wider challenges and opportunities around assessing CT in K-8 classrooms.

ECS: Shared Research, Shared Data
Monica McGill, Alan Peterfreund

The workshop will allow those projects that have been using the ECS curriculum to share lessons learned associated with teacher professional training, experience and support; student learning, and school/district implementation. The specific focus will be instruments and processes of data collection, data utilization as part of the RPP, and findings. The overarching objective is to use this discussion to identify next steps for potentially collecting data through common instruments or constructs in order to support the sharing of data. This in turn can facilitate the participating projects to identify generalized learning about implementing ECS and contextualize local circumstances. This workshop will also be linked to efforts by CSEdResearch to serve as a common platform for data sharing moving forward.