Research-Practice Partnership (RPP)
Development Workshops for CS for All

Upcoming Workshops/Application     About RPPs     Resources     Workshop Presenters     Researchers/Evaluators

This fall, the Collaboratory is co-hosting four RPP Development workshops to support the CS for All community in its applications to the NSF CS for All RPP solicitation, which has a due date of February 12, 2019.

Over one-and-a-half days, teams will develop a deeper understanding of what an RPP is, how to form and sustain one, and how to design an RPP project or proposal.  In particular we will emphasize how RPPs designed for equity among participants can support equity in CS education, which is a primary goal of the NSF CS for All RPP program and solicitation.

We are offering two different types of workshops this fall:

1. How to design a new RPP.  Seattle and Boston/Waltham, MA: This workshop will allow you and your team to spend extended and structured time together to identify and refine the problem of practice your RPP project seeks to address, your strategy for addressing the problem, your research and evaluation questions, and the kinds of data you will need to collect to inform and improve your project in a timely way while advancing theory over the long run. You will leave the workshop with a plan or outline for a project or proposal that you can further develop as an established team.

2. How to revise and strengthen your RPP proposal.  Austin and Atlanta: For teams that plan to revise and resubmit an RPP proposal that was unsuccessful at panel, this workshop will involve peer-led critical reviews, and one-on-one consultation, to strengthen your RPP plan.  We will attend to how your project demonstrates a true partnership, if and how you are collecting and reviewing data in ways that leverage the perspectives of your RPP partners, and how your project will advance equity in CS education.  You will be expected to provide constructive critical feedback to other projects as well as receive feedback on your own.  You will leave the workshop with revised proposal sections and plans that you can further develop as an established team.

Both workshops will emphasize:

  • Different forms of RPPs (networked improvement communities, design-based implementation projects, and research alliances)
  • Structures and mechanisms for maintaining a thriving RPP
  • Data collection and joint analysis within RPPs
  • Evaluating and documenting impacts of your RPP
  • Broadening participation in computer science through equity in CS education

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Upcoming Workshops and Application

New RPP Projects Workshops—Registration is CLOSED. Sign up for our mailing list to be contacted about future workshops.

NSF CS for All RPP Proposal Resubmission Workshops—Registration is CLOSED. Sign up for our mailing list to be contacted about future workshops.

Apply Now

Funds are available to support your team’s travel, lodging and subsistence as well as all workshop costs. Eligible teams will:

  • Be able to describe how your RPP project will advance equity in CS education.
  • Have a basic idea of the shared area of interest or CS for All activity that you want to develop and implement together.
  • Consist of 3-4 individuals, including
    • an educational researcher
    • an educational partner from an LEA/SEA, school network, or similar
    • a computer scientist or CS/CT expert
    • an optional fourth team member representing community partners, informal education partners, evaluators, or additional LEA/SEA or research team members

Priority will be given to full teams of four.  Questions?  Email contact@researchandpractice.org

Teams will be notified about their acceptance shortly after deadlines noted above.  If space allows, we will accept additional teams on a rolling basis thereafter.

THE APPLICATION DEADLINE FOR THIS ROUND HAS PASSED.
Sign up for our mailing list to be contacted about future workshop opportunities.

Previous Workshops

links take you to archived pages, when available

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About Research-Practice Partnerships

Research-Practice Partnerships represent an emerging approach to educational research that is designed to simultaneously develop practice and knowledge. Working in close partnership, educational researchers and practitioners together identify pressing problems of practice, develop research questions, examine data, and collaboratively make sense of the findings. Partnerships engage in data collection that can provide timely formative feedback to guide practice, support program adjustments, and contribute to a longer term educational research direction and body of knowledge.

The Computer Science for All RPP program solicitation from the National Science Foundation focuses on the importance of researcher-practitioner partnerships (RPPs) in supporting computer science (CS) and computational thinking (CT) education. Specifically, the program solicitation states:

RPPs aim to strengthen the capacity of an organization to reliably produce valued CS and CT education outcomes for diverse groups of students, educated by different teachers from varied organizational contexts. The focus is on succeeding when implemented at scale. These studies have less prescriptive research designs and methods, with research occurring in rapid, iterative, and context-expanding cycles. They require deep engagement of researchers and practitioners during the collaborative research on problems of practice that are co-defined and of value to researchers and education agencies, for example, a school district or community of schools.

Why Now?

The RPP movement has emerged in response to findings that educational research results are too seldom used to improve educational practice. Traditionally educational research is conducted over timeframes that don’t sync with the needs of practice. It often focuses on questions that are important to theory building but may not be directly relevant to or applicable in the daily life of practice. And, as the intellectual property of one party (the learning researcher), findings are often circulated exclusively within academic journals and conferences and framed in academic language.

There is widespread and growing recognition that efforts to design and implement CS/CT programs at the K-12 level can be strengthened by (a) building on evidence (b) using evidence to improve practice in timely ways and (c) generating new evidence that can inform the field at large, and build the research evidence base on equity-oriented CS/CT education (including designs, supports, and outcomes).

Some consider RPPs to be a more ethical and equitable approach to educational research because the voices, concerns, interests, and contexts of the CS educator are on an equal footing with those of the learning researcher, and in fact shape the nature of the learning research. Others argue that RPP studies lead to more sustainable results because findings have been developed in ways that take the detailed insider knowledge about complex and dynamic contexts of CS education into account in the research design. Through the partnership, the educational research design itself sometimes shifts and adjusts to new initiatives or needs that arise in the complex context of educational practice.

What’s New?

There is some history of “collaborative research” in the field of computer science. But RPPs are different than most forms of collaborative research in that they are meant to establish relationships that exceed the boundaries of a single project, and can grow and evolve over time. In RPPs, one person is not “working for” the other. Rather they are working together to find the most powerful way to gain traction on a mutual area of interest. A significant byproduct of RPP work is the expanded intellectual community and social networks that accrue to RPP participants.

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Resources

Reports and Publications

Sample Funding Solicitations

Relevant Websites

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Workshop Presenters

Bronwyn Bevan is Senior Research Scientist at the University of Washington. She is Principal Investigator of the Research + Practice Collaboratory. Her research examines how learning opportunities, across formal and informal settings, can be organized to advance equity in education. She served on the National Research Council’s Committee on Out-of-School Time STEM Learning and is on the editorial board of Science Education.

 

Joshua Childs is an assistant professor of Educational Policy and Planning (EPP) in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. Joshua’s research focuses on the role of interorganizational networks, cross-sector collaborations, and strategic alliances to address complex educational issues. Specifically, his work examines collaborative approaches involving community organizations and stakeholders that have the potential to improve academic achievement and reduce opportunity gaps for students in urban and rural schools. Joshua is an RGK Faculty Fellow (http://rgkcenter.org/) and a faculty fellow with the Institute for Urban Policy Research & Analysis (https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/iupra/index.php).

Jan Cuny is a program officer at the National Science Foundation (NSF) where she leads the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate’s efforts on broadening participation and education in computing. Her work led to the establishment of the eight national BPC-A Alliances that together address underrepresentation in computing from elementary school through the research and professional levels. More recently, she spearheaded NSF’s efforts to get inclusive, rigorous, academic computing courses into America’s schools. That work, in part, laid the foundation for the 2016 launch of national CS for All Initiative.

Leigh Ann Delyser is a lifelong advocate of computer science education. At CSforALL, Leigh Ann oversees research efforts and advises and implements programs that align with the organization’s strategic goals. Leigh Ann is also a co-founder of the CSforALL Consortium, a national network of CS education content providers, school districts, education associations, and researchers devoted to the mission of CSforALL. Prior to joining CSforALL, Leigh Ann worked for 5 years expanding access to CS education for students in NYC, for 10 years as a HS CS teacher, served on the Board of Directors for CSTA, and earned her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in Computer Science and Cognitive Psychology, with a focus on CS education. Leigh Ann also co-authored the influential Running on Empty report, highlighting the lack of standards in CS education in the United States.

Lucia Dettori is the Executive Director of the Office of Computer Science Education at Chicago Public Schools(CPS). In this capacity, Lucia leads a team who work to ensure that all students in CPS have access to engaging and rigorous computer science curriculum at all levels. CPS is the first large urban district in the United States to make computer science a graduation requirement for high school students.
Lucia is currently on leave from DePaul University where she holds the position of Associate Dean of the College of Computing and Digital Media. She has an extensive publication record in the area of scientific computing, medical image processing, and computer science education. Her work has been supported by grants from federal agencies and private foundations including National Science Foundation, NATO, NASA, IBM, and Google. Before joining DePaul University, Lucia held positions at Southern Methodist University and Brown University. She earned a doctorate in Applied Mathematics from the University of Paris XI, France.

 

Dr. Carol Fletcher is the Deputy Director of the Center for STEM Education at UT Austin, where she directs statewide professional development programs for STEM teachers such as the TRC and WeTeach_CS, serving over 10,000 educators annually through 91 projects involving 40+ colleges and universities, and 800 school districts. Carol has been elected to 6 terms on the Pflugerville ISD Board of Trustees since 2001, serving as Board President for 5 years. Additional leadership roles include serving as the Chair of the Texas CS Task Force, CS4TX Steering Committee, and NSF’s Expanding Computing Education Pathways Alliance state lead.

Erin Henrick, Ed.D. is a senior research associate in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University. Erin co-leads a research practice partnership aiming to develop a system of practical measures and routines to improve the implementation of rigorous instructional materials in middle-grades mathematics. Additional information can be found at http://www.education.uw.edu/pmr2.

 

Kara Jackson is an associate professor of mathematics education at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research focuses on specifying forms of practice that support a broad range of learners to participate substantially in rigorous mathematics and how to support teachers to develop such forms of practice at scale.  She currently leads an NSF-funded project aimed at developing tools, routines, and data representations that practitioners can use to engage in frequent, disciplined inquiry regarding the implementation of instructional improvement strategies in middle-grades mathematics; the project involves multiple research-practice partnerships.

Karen D. King, PhD is Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings in the Education and Human Resources Directorate. She most recently served as Director of Research for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the largest professional association of mathematics teachers in the world, serving the US and Canada.

 

June Mark, Managing Project Director at EDC, leads R&D related to mathematics and computer science teacher professional development, instructional design, and curriculum implementation. Her research interests include identifying systems and supports to ensure all students access quality mathematics and computer science learning experiences, building resources to support the learning of teachers and district leaders, and understanding and supporting high-quality curriculum implementation. At EDC, she is co-PI for Beauty and Joy of Computing in NYC, an NSF -funded Mathematics and Science Partnership that is adapting UC Berkeley’s Beauty and Joy of Computing course for high school students and scaling it across New York City. She is also co-PI for Supporting Success in Algebra, a study of the implementation and impact of Transition to Algebra, an innovative algebra support curriculum for at-risk ninth graders, and Think Math+C, an effort to integrate programming into elementary mathematics curricula. Ms. Mark is lead author of Transition to Algebra and co-author of the professional book Making Sense of Algebra. Previously, she was PI of Coherent Implementation of Mathematics Instructional Materials, a longitudinal study of implementation of elementary mathematics materials and effects on student achievement; Implementing the Mathematical Practice Standards, which designed and tested PD programming on the Common Core’s Standards for Mathematical Practice for secondary teachers; and iPuzzle, which developed a set of apps with algebraic puzzles.

Brandeis Marshall is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. Her research lies in the areas of information retrieval, data science, data mining, and social media. She also is Director of the Data Analytics and Exploration (da+e) Laboratory. The da+e lab is a research and education space for investigating real-world data issues, challenges and solutions, and making research contributions in various aspects of data science and analytics supported by external funding organizations. Current da+e lab activities include the BlackTwitter Project and the NSF HBCU-UP Data Science eXtension (DSX) project.

Dr. Steven McGee is president of The Learning Partnership, an independent research organization that focuses on development and implementation of STEM interventions. He is a cofounder and research director for the Chicago Alliance for Equity in Computer Science (CAFÉCS), which supports the Computer Science for All initiative in Chicago, spanning the spectrum from elementary to higher education. He serves as the outreach director for the NSF-funded Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research program in Puerto Rico, his maternal family’s homeland. Dr. McGee has two decades of expertise in fostering long-term partnerships between researchers and practitioners. As one of the first learning scientists in the nation, he studies how to support learning from an individual cognitive perspective as well as from the perspective of systems and social contexts. He has formerly served as a Northwestern University faculty member in the School of Education and Social Policy, Director of Technology and Assessment at Loyola University, and Chief R&D Officer for the NASA Classroom of the Future. As an entrepreneur, he has launched two educational companies. He received a B.S. in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University with a concentration in computer studies and child development. He received a Ph.D. in the learning sciences from Northwestern University and an MBA from Wheeling Jesuit University.

Alicia Morris is a high school teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District. Her work focuses on mathematics and computer science within the context of design, making and problem-solving. She has participated in various NSF projects ranging from game design to looking at the intersection of traditional female crafting and mathematics. Alicia is currently working alongside Jean Ryoo on their RPP (REAL CS), in addition to being a computer science fellow for Mathematics for America (LA), and lead teacher for Mendez High School’s CS for All and Beyond pathway. In her 18th year as an educator, Alicia is teaching AP Computer Science Principles, AP Computer Science A, Exploring Computer Science and Introduction to Fashion Design. Alicia holds a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics from FIU and a Master’s degree in Education from UCLA.

Dr. Fay Cobb Payton is a Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Division of Computer and Network Systems which is in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). At the NSF, she is working with a group of leaders on programs involving Computer Science for All, INCLUDES, Excellence in Research, ADVANCE, and Broadening Participation. She is a Full Professor of Information Technology/Systems at North Carolina State University and a named University Faculty Scholar for her leadership in turning research into solutions to society’s most pressing issues.

Andy_RasmussenAndy Rasmussen is the Computer Science Project Developer at Chicago Public Schools, working to integrate CS into the curriculum and the culture at CPS. Over the course of his career as a theoretical and computational chemist, he learned the hard way what he believes every student should learn in school: the power of computing to empower students to shape their own future. He answered an early call from CS4All at CPS to serve as a teaching assistant for new CS teachers, and fell in love with the work that would shortly become CAFÉCS. Andy also now teaches at DePaul, leading a class of CS undergraduates who serve as teaching assistants in Chicago CS classrooms.

Jean Ryoo is the Director of Research for the Exploring Computer Science Project, an equity-focused CS effort at the University of California, Los Angeles. Currently, with funding from the National Science Foundation and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the team is building a research-practice partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District to understand, from youth perspectives, what students are learning in introductory CS courses, and how their experiences with computing impact their engagement, agency, and identity in CS. Jean previously worked at the Exploratorium of San Francisco in two different RPPs (with the California Tinkering Afterschool Network,www.exploratorium.edu/ctan, and with a public school in East Oakland) to explore how tinkering/making education can address equity issues that span both informal and formal STEM education. Jean received her PhD from UCLA, MEdT from University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and her BA from Harvard University.

Don-YanekDon Yanek is the Special Agent for CS4All in the Office of Computer Science Education at Chicago Public Schools, and previously taught computer science for 23 years in Chicago. Don was a founding member and leader in the Chicago CSTA chapter, as well as of the Chicago Alliance for Equity in Computer Science Education. He is a veteran Exploring Computer Science (ECS) facilitator, has revised two units of the ECS curriculum, and currently coaches new ECS teachers across Chicago. Apart from being a music fanatic, Don plays drums in The Purcells.

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