Sharin Jacob | University of California, Irvine (original) (raw)
Papers by Sharin Jacob
This study explores the experiences of elementary school students with disabilities in learning c... more This study explores the experiences of elementary school students with disabilities in learning computer programming and investigates the instructional strategies that enhance their learning within a culturally sustaining computer science curriculum. The case study was conducted in a special education classroom with multilingual Latinx students, utilizing an integrated computer science curriculum with a focus on community-based environmental literacy. The computer science projects aimed to promote peer collaboration, innovative problem-solving skills, and computational thinking skills. Students who typically do not interact with their peers engaged in rich collaboration during the computer science class. Additionally, students with behavioral and performance difficulties exhibited heightened engagement with the projects, channeling their creativity through computational thinking. Moreover, students applied the environmental knowledge they gained in class to real-world community settings. The instructional strategies employed by the teacher to support her students included engaging multiple senses, involving student experts, providing explicit instructions, modeling computational steps, and drawing connections between environmental and computational thinking concepts and students' real-life situations. The results of this study underscore how a culturally sustaining computer science curriculum can empower diverse students, fostering inclusivity and leveraging their strengths. Furthermore, the results offer insight into effective teaching practices for supporting diverse students in a coding environment.
This study explores the experiences of elementary school students with disabilities in learning c... more This study explores the experiences of elementary school students with disabilities in learning computer programming and investigates the instructional strategies that enhance their learning within a culturally sustaining computer science curriculum. The case study was conducted in a special education classroom with multilingual Latinx students, utilizing an integrated computer science curriculum with a focus on community-based environmental literacy. The computer science projects aimed to promote peer collaboration, innovative problem-solving skills, and computational thinking skills. Students who typically do not interact with their peers engaged in rich collaboration during the computer science class. Additionally, students with behavioral and performance difficulties exhibited heightened engagement with the projects, channeling their creativity through computational thinking. Moreover, students applied the environmental knowledge they gained in class to real-world community settings. The instructional strategies employed by the teacher to support her students included engaging multiple senses, involving student experts, providing explicit instructions, modeling computational steps, and drawing connections between environmental and computational thinking concepts and students' real-life situations. The results of this study underscore how a culturally sustaining computer science curriculum can empower diverse students, fostering inclusivity and leveraging their strengths. Furthermore, the results offer insight into effective teaching practices for supporting diverse students in a coding environment.
Journal of Second Language Writing
Much computer science education research tailors curricula to specific demographic groups, yet of... more Much computer science education research tailors curricula to specific demographic groups, yet often overlooks students with intersecting backgrounds. This paper explores the implementation of the Coding as Another Language curriculum for predominantly Latine, multilingual, and low-socioeconomic students. To evaluate student performance, we used a pre-and-post-test design on a validated coding assessment using a hierarchical linear model with fixed effects to control for teacher, grade-level, and parents’ educational attainment. Findings indicated that students began the curriculum with wide disparities in initial coding abilities. Looking at the intersection of language, gender, and socioeconomic characteristics, we found pre-test average score differences between intersectionally identified groups of up to 1.81 with a large effect size of 1.13. Many group differences in the average pre-test scores were significant with medium to large effect sizes. The post-minus-pre-test differen...
arXiv, 2023
Much computer science education research tailors curricula to specific demographic groups, yet of... more Much computer science education research tailors curricula to specific demographic groups, yet often overlooks students with intersecting backgrounds. This paper explores the implementation of the Coding as Another Language curriculum for predominantly Latine, multilingual, and low-socioeconomic students. To evaluate student performance, we used a pre-and-post-test design on a validated coding assessment using a hierarchical linear model with fixed effects to control for teacher, grade-level, and parents' educational attainment. Findings indicated that students began the curriculum with wide disparities in initial coding abilities. Looking at the intersection of language, gender, and socioeconomic characteristics, we found pre-test average score differences between intersectionally identified groups of up to 1.81 with a large effect size of 1.13. Many group differences in the average pre-test scores were significant with medium to large effect sizes. The post-minus-pre-test difference demonstrated significant improvement in all students' coding scores after exposure to the curriculum, with an effect size of 2.63. We found significant heterogeneity in these gains, with greater increases for students who entered the curriculum with lower initial pre-test scores. The largest post-test average score difference of 1.15 with a medium effect size of 0.72 was smaller than pre-test average score differences, mostly representing statistically insignificant differences with trivial effect sizes. This convergence in post-test average scores demonstrates that differential improvements mitigated pre-existing disparities in initial coding abilities. Our results prompt a compelling discussion on the curricular foundations that effectively mitigate disparities among students with diverse and intersecting backgrounds.
Proceedings of the 2023 AERA Annual Meeting
Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1
Researchers and practitioners have worked to bring computer science to all students. However, CS ... more Researchers and practitioners have worked to bring computer science to all students. However, CS is still an inequitable field. When developing curricula, we must account for the importance of connecting the lives and identities of historically marginalized students with instructional materials. We examine the knowledge and experiences that elementary (age 9-10) students drew upon to implement an open-ended programming assignment about themselves. We coded the Scratch projects of 189 students to investigate what aspects of their lives students reference, and how they use various modalities in Scratch to create digital media products about themselves. In our data, we found that the most common spheres portrayed were identity, hobbies and leisure, and interests. When expressing their identities, students narrated their experiences, expressed consciousness about their skills, connected to the user via their interests, and sometimes discussed equity. Additionally, our findings add to previous literature on Scratch as an effective platform for digital media production. In particular, we found that students used dialogue, images, sound, and the title to represent their spheres of influence through programming multimedia and interactive projects. This work has implications for the development of curricula and teaching guides for upper elementary students courses on computational thinking. Spheres of influence could inform researchers on the most influential aspects of students life in a specific context, providing elements for creating culturally relevant and interest-based materials and lessons. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics → Computational thinking; K-12 education; Computing literacy.
Routledge eBooks, Jan 26, 2023
Journal of Computer Science Integration
Women are severely underrepresented in computer science (CS) degrees and careers. While student i... more Women are severely underrepresented in computer science (CS) degrees and careers. While student interest is a key predictor of success, little is known about how elementary students from underserved groups, such as girls, develop their interest in CS. To address this issue, we examined the differences in attitudes between upper elementary girls and boys towards CS after participating in a yearlong, inquiry-based CS curriculum designed for diverse learners. Pre-and-post surveys on students’ attitudes towards CS (n = 108) were delivered before and after student participation in the curriculum. Results from the survey showed only two demonstrated significant differences between boys and girls, favoring girls talking more with friends and family about CS and boys believing that computer scientists make a difference in the world. Even for these two items, the differences were of marginal significance and that significance would not survive correction for multiple comparisons. Follow-up, ...
Proceedings of the 2022 AERA Annual Meeting
Proceedings of the IEEE Annual International Conference on Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology, 2020
Identity, Multilingualism and CALL: Responding to New Global Realities, Jun 30, 2022
Computer Science Education, 2021
Background and Context: Computational Thinking (CT) is a skill all students should learn. This re... more Background and Context: Computational Thinking (CT) is a skill all students should learn. This requires using inclusive approaches to teach CT to a wide spectrum of students. However, strategies fo...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Background: There has been a dearth of research on intersectional identities in STEM, including t... more Background: There has been a dearth of research on intersectional identities in STEM, including the fields of computing and engineering. In computing education research, much work has been done on broadening participation, but there has been little investigation into how the field of computer science (CS) presents opportunities for students with strong intersectional identities. This study explores the strengths and connections among the unique identities and the symbiotic relationships that elementary Latina students hold in CS identity attainment. Purpose: The aim of this article is to better understand how predominantly low-income, multilingual Latina students experience identity development through the lens of diverse group membership. We examine how young Latinas, through their participation in a yearlong culturally and linguistically responsive CS curriculum, leverage their intersecting identities to rewrite the formula of what a computer scientist is and can be, leaving space...
Computational Thinking in PreK-5
ACM Transactions on Computing Education, 2022
Developing student interest is critical to supporting student learning in computer science. Resea... more Developing student interest is critical to supporting student learning in computer science. Research indicates that student interest is a key predictor of persistence and achievement. While there is a growing body of work on developing computing identities for diverse students, little research focuses on early exposure to develop multilingual studentsâĂŹ interest in computing. These students represent one of the fastest growing populations in the US, yet they are dramatically underrepresented in computer science education. This study examines identity development of upper elementary multilingual students as they engage in a year-long computational thinking curriculum, and follows their engagement across multiple settings (i.e., school, club, home, community). Findings from pre-and-post surveys of identity showed signiicant diferences favoring studentsâĂŹ experiences with computer science, their perceptions of computer science, their perceptions of themselves as computer scientists, and their family support for computer science. Findings from follow-up interviews and prior research suggest that tailored instruction provides opportunities for connections to out-of-school learning environments with friends and family that may shift studentsâĂŹ perceptions of their abilities to pursue computer science and persist when encountering challenges.
2020 Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), 2020
This paper examines teachers' use of Flipgrid, a student-facing video platform, as a reflection t... more This paper examines teachers' use of Flipgrid, a student-facing video platform, as a reflection tool to promote computer science language in upper elementary classrooms. We take a case-study approach with three fourth grade teachers: one had a high number of students with special needs, one had substantially more gifted and talented students, and one taught a dual immersion English-Spanish class. Data sources include teacher interviews, design meetings between researchers and teachers, and classroom observations. We find that teachers with different pedagogical visions adopted the tools for reinforcement, student engagement, and formative assessment. We document teachers' iterative improvement strategies and shifts in teacher noticing, particularly the objects (i.e., computer science vocabulary and concepts), level (i.e., whole-class versus individual students), and depth of how they noticed students learning through video reflections. This study contributes to the ongoing work that examines instructional approaches to promoting computing education in diverse K-12 classrooms, especially among teachers with no formal training in computer science education.
2020 Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), 2020
Central to the theory of learning are inquiry-based approaches to education. Whereas there is a p... more Central to the theory of learning are inquiry-based approaches to education. Whereas there is a plethora of research on inquiry learning in the domain of science [19], [20], few studies have analyzed how inquiry-based learning can be applied to computer science education, and how different approaches to inquiry may benefit diverse learners. This is one of the first studies to analyze teacher enactment of inquiry-based learning during the implementation of an upper elementary, computational thinking curriculum, and to explore how teacher approaches to inquiry appear to support or constrain multilingual students' development of computational thinking and computer science identities. Design-based research was used to iteratively develop, test, and refine the inquiry-based curriculum, which aligns with computer science and literacy standards, provides linguistic scaffolding, and integrates culturally responsive materials. We adopt a cross-case mixed-methods design to collect data fr...
2021 Conference on Research in Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), 2021
Few interventions in K-12 Computer Science (CS) education center on multilingual students who spe... more Few interventions in K-12 Computer Science (CS) education center on multilingual students who speak more than one language and may be learning English. Emerging research illustrates how multilingual students draw on a range of resources (e.g., cultural, linguistic, semiotic, and embodied) during CS learning activities. Instructional models that leverage these resources can open new possibilities for inclusive CS education. Panel presenters representing four projects working to integrate CS education into multilingual K-12 environments will highlight efforts demonstrating how multilingual students' resources, and educators' engagement with them, shape how these students participate in CS education. Each project positions these resources differently with respect to traditional schooling arrangements, CS content and practices, and language goals. This panel will explore those contrasts and the tensions they surface.
This study explores the experiences of elementary school students with disabilities in learning c... more This study explores the experiences of elementary school students with disabilities in learning computer programming and investigates the instructional strategies that enhance their learning within a culturally sustaining computer science curriculum. The case study was conducted in a special education classroom with multilingual Latinx students, utilizing an integrated computer science curriculum with a focus on community-based environmental literacy. The computer science projects aimed to promote peer collaboration, innovative problem-solving skills, and computational thinking skills. Students who typically do not interact with their peers engaged in rich collaboration during the computer science class. Additionally, students with behavioral and performance difficulties exhibited heightened engagement with the projects, channeling their creativity through computational thinking. Moreover, students applied the environmental knowledge they gained in class to real-world community settings. The instructional strategies employed by the teacher to support her students included engaging multiple senses, involving student experts, providing explicit instructions, modeling computational steps, and drawing connections between environmental and computational thinking concepts and students' real-life situations. The results of this study underscore how a culturally sustaining computer science curriculum can empower diverse students, fostering inclusivity and leveraging their strengths. Furthermore, the results offer insight into effective teaching practices for supporting diverse students in a coding environment.
This study explores the experiences of elementary school students with disabilities in learning c... more This study explores the experiences of elementary school students with disabilities in learning computer programming and investigates the instructional strategies that enhance their learning within a culturally sustaining computer science curriculum. The case study was conducted in a special education classroom with multilingual Latinx students, utilizing an integrated computer science curriculum with a focus on community-based environmental literacy. The computer science projects aimed to promote peer collaboration, innovative problem-solving skills, and computational thinking skills. Students who typically do not interact with their peers engaged in rich collaboration during the computer science class. Additionally, students with behavioral and performance difficulties exhibited heightened engagement with the projects, channeling their creativity through computational thinking. Moreover, students applied the environmental knowledge they gained in class to real-world community settings. The instructional strategies employed by the teacher to support her students included engaging multiple senses, involving student experts, providing explicit instructions, modeling computational steps, and drawing connections between environmental and computational thinking concepts and students' real-life situations. The results of this study underscore how a culturally sustaining computer science curriculum can empower diverse students, fostering inclusivity and leveraging their strengths. Furthermore, the results offer insight into effective teaching practices for supporting diverse students in a coding environment.
Journal of Second Language Writing
Much computer science education research tailors curricula to specific demographic groups, yet of... more Much computer science education research tailors curricula to specific demographic groups, yet often overlooks students with intersecting backgrounds. This paper explores the implementation of the Coding as Another Language curriculum for predominantly Latine, multilingual, and low-socioeconomic students. To evaluate student performance, we used a pre-and-post-test design on a validated coding assessment using a hierarchical linear model with fixed effects to control for teacher, grade-level, and parents’ educational attainment. Findings indicated that students began the curriculum with wide disparities in initial coding abilities. Looking at the intersection of language, gender, and socioeconomic characteristics, we found pre-test average score differences between intersectionally identified groups of up to 1.81 with a large effect size of 1.13. Many group differences in the average pre-test scores were significant with medium to large effect sizes. The post-minus-pre-test differen...
arXiv, 2023
Much computer science education research tailors curricula to specific demographic groups, yet of... more Much computer science education research tailors curricula to specific demographic groups, yet often overlooks students with intersecting backgrounds. This paper explores the implementation of the Coding as Another Language curriculum for predominantly Latine, multilingual, and low-socioeconomic students. To evaluate student performance, we used a pre-and-post-test design on a validated coding assessment using a hierarchical linear model with fixed effects to control for teacher, grade-level, and parents' educational attainment. Findings indicated that students began the curriculum with wide disparities in initial coding abilities. Looking at the intersection of language, gender, and socioeconomic characteristics, we found pre-test average score differences between intersectionally identified groups of up to 1.81 with a large effect size of 1.13. Many group differences in the average pre-test scores were significant with medium to large effect sizes. The post-minus-pre-test difference demonstrated significant improvement in all students' coding scores after exposure to the curriculum, with an effect size of 2.63. We found significant heterogeneity in these gains, with greater increases for students who entered the curriculum with lower initial pre-test scores. The largest post-test average score difference of 1.15 with a medium effect size of 0.72 was smaller than pre-test average score differences, mostly representing statistically insignificant differences with trivial effect sizes. This convergence in post-test average scores demonstrates that differential improvements mitigated pre-existing disparities in initial coding abilities. Our results prompt a compelling discussion on the curricular foundations that effectively mitigate disparities among students with diverse and intersecting backgrounds.
Proceedings of the 2023 AERA Annual Meeting
Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1
Researchers and practitioners have worked to bring computer science to all students. However, CS ... more Researchers and practitioners have worked to bring computer science to all students. However, CS is still an inequitable field. When developing curricula, we must account for the importance of connecting the lives and identities of historically marginalized students with instructional materials. We examine the knowledge and experiences that elementary (age 9-10) students drew upon to implement an open-ended programming assignment about themselves. We coded the Scratch projects of 189 students to investigate what aspects of their lives students reference, and how they use various modalities in Scratch to create digital media products about themselves. In our data, we found that the most common spheres portrayed were identity, hobbies and leisure, and interests. When expressing their identities, students narrated their experiences, expressed consciousness about their skills, connected to the user via their interests, and sometimes discussed equity. Additionally, our findings add to previous literature on Scratch as an effective platform for digital media production. In particular, we found that students used dialogue, images, sound, and the title to represent their spheres of influence through programming multimedia and interactive projects. This work has implications for the development of curricula and teaching guides for upper elementary students courses on computational thinking. Spheres of influence could inform researchers on the most influential aspects of students life in a specific context, providing elements for creating culturally relevant and interest-based materials and lessons. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics → Computational thinking; K-12 education; Computing literacy.
Routledge eBooks, Jan 26, 2023
Journal of Computer Science Integration
Women are severely underrepresented in computer science (CS) degrees and careers. While student i... more Women are severely underrepresented in computer science (CS) degrees and careers. While student interest is a key predictor of success, little is known about how elementary students from underserved groups, such as girls, develop their interest in CS. To address this issue, we examined the differences in attitudes between upper elementary girls and boys towards CS after participating in a yearlong, inquiry-based CS curriculum designed for diverse learners. Pre-and-post surveys on students’ attitudes towards CS (n = 108) were delivered before and after student participation in the curriculum. Results from the survey showed only two demonstrated significant differences between boys and girls, favoring girls talking more with friends and family about CS and boys believing that computer scientists make a difference in the world. Even for these two items, the differences were of marginal significance and that significance would not survive correction for multiple comparisons. Follow-up, ...
Proceedings of the 2022 AERA Annual Meeting
Proceedings of the IEEE Annual International Conference on Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology, 2020
Identity, Multilingualism and CALL: Responding to New Global Realities, Jun 30, 2022
Computer Science Education, 2021
Background and Context: Computational Thinking (CT) is a skill all students should learn. This re... more Background and Context: Computational Thinking (CT) is a skill all students should learn. This requires using inclusive approaches to teach CT to a wide spectrum of students. However, strategies fo...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Background: There has been a dearth of research on intersectional identities in STEM, including t... more Background: There has been a dearth of research on intersectional identities in STEM, including the fields of computing and engineering. In computing education research, much work has been done on broadening participation, but there has been little investigation into how the field of computer science (CS) presents opportunities for students with strong intersectional identities. This study explores the strengths and connections among the unique identities and the symbiotic relationships that elementary Latina students hold in CS identity attainment. Purpose: The aim of this article is to better understand how predominantly low-income, multilingual Latina students experience identity development through the lens of diverse group membership. We examine how young Latinas, through their participation in a yearlong culturally and linguistically responsive CS curriculum, leverage their intersecting identities to rewrite the formula of what a computer scientist is and can be, leaving space...
Computational Thinking in PreK-5
ACM Transactions on Computing Education, 2022
Developing student interest is critical to supporting student learning in computer science. Resea... more Developing student interest is critical to supporting student learning in computer science. Research indicates that student interest is a key predictor of persistence and achievement. While there is a growing body of work on developing computing identities for diverse students, little research focuses on early exposure to develop multilingual studentsâĂŹ interest in computing. These students represent one of the fastest growing populations in the US, yet they are dramatically underrepresented in computer science education. This study examines identity development of upper elementary multilingual students as they engage in a year-long computational thinking curriculum, and follows their engagement across multiple settings (i.e., school, club, home, community). Findings from pre-and-post surveys of identity showed signiicant diferences favoring studentsâĂŹ experiences with computer science, their perceptions of computer science, their perceptions of themselves as computer scientists, and their family support for computer science. Findings from follow-up interviews and prior research suggest that tailored instruction provides opportunities for connections to out-of-school learning environments with friends and family that may shift studentsâĂŹ perceptions of their abilities to pursue computer science and persist when encountering challenges.
2020 Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), 2020
This paper examines teachers' use of Flipgrid, a student-facing video platform, as a reflection t... more This paper examines teachers' use of Flipgrid, a student-facing video platform, as a reflection tool to promote computer science language in upper elementary classrooms. We take a case-study approach with three fourth grade teachers: one had a high number of students with special needs, one had substantially more gifted and talented students, and one taught a dual immersion English-Spanish class. Data sources include teacher interviews, design meetings between researchers and teachers, and classroom observations. We find that teachers with different pedagogical visions adopted the tools for reinforcement, student engagement, and formative assessment. We document teachers' iterative improvement strategies and shifts in teacher noticing, particularly the objects (i.e., computer science vocabulary and concepts), level (i.e., whole-class versus individual students), and depth of how they noticed students learning through video reflections. This study contributes to the ongoing work that examines instructional approaches to promoting computing education in diverse K-12 classrooms, especially among teachers with no formal training in computer science education.
2020 Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), 2020
Central to the theory of learning are inquiry-based approaches to education. Whereas there is a p... more Central to the theory of learning are inquiry-based approaches to education. Whereas there is a plethora of research on inquiry learning in the domain of science [19], [20], few studies have analyzed how inquiry-based learning can be applied to computer science education, and how different approaches to inquiry may benefit diverse learners. This is one of the first studies to analyze teacher enactment of inquiry-based learning during the implementation of an upper elementary, computational thinking curriculum, and to explore how teacher approaches to inquiry appear to support or constrain multilingual students' development of computational thinking and computer science identities. Design-based research was used to iteratively develop, test, and refine the inquiry-based curriculum, which aligns with computer science and literacy standards, provides linguistic scaffolding, and integrates culturally responsive materials. We adopt a cross-case mixed-methods design to collect data fr...
2021 Conference on Research in Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), 2021
Few interventions in K-12 Computer Science (CS) education center on multilingual students who spe... more Few interventions in K-12 Computer Science (CS) education center on multilingual students who speak more than one language and may be learning English. Emerging research illustrates how multilingual students draw on a range of resources (e.g., cultural, linguistic, semiotic, and embodied) during CS learning activities. Instructional models that leverage these resources can open new possibilities for inclusive CS education. Panel presenters representing four projects working to integrate CS education into multilingual K-12 environments will highlight efforts demonstrating how multilingual students' resources, and educators' engagement with them, shape how these students participate in CS education. Each project positions these resources differently with respect to traditional schooling arrangements, CS content and practices, and language goals. This panel will explore those contrasts and the tensions they surface.