In early 2020, a cohort of 30 high schools engaged in a year-long intervention designed to increase their ability to offer Computer Science (CS) and Cybersecurity education to their students. After we performed an evaluation of the intervention’s impacts, we turned our attention to whether or not the outcomes were influenced by the engagement of the schools in the cohort.
In this research paper, we focus on the guiding research question: How do schools’ engagement in an intervention designed to build equitable CS and Cybersecurity education capacity impact schools’ course offerings and students’ participation in these courses? To measure equitable impact, we evaluated changes to actual CS and Cybersecurity course offerings and enrollment at the schools. We focused on the differences in participation across student gender and race/ethnicity as well as participation levels at the different schools across three years prior to the intervention and one year after the intervention. Findings indicate that, despite the disruption to schools from the COVID-19 pandemic, schools engaged in the program had very significant increases in AP CSP, AP CS A, and Cybersecurity course offerings and enrollment, particularly at schools that serve students from low-income families.
Read the full report here.