Your Voice is Power: Integrating Computing, Music, Entrepreneurship, and Social Justice Learning

2024 · 1 citations

• Computer Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology

Abstract Computational thinking has become pervasive across many technical and creative disciplines. Creating a computationally literate workforce capable of recognizing and eliminating algorithmic discrimination requires diverse perspectives and lived experiences. Your Voice is Power is a 5-class period curriculum targeted for K-12 audiences that seeks to promote racial equity and increase interest in computing careers by integrating elements of computing, music, social justice, and entrepreneurship. Centering around the song "Entrepreneur" by Pharrell Williams, students engage in lyrical analysis to extract and explore themes of social justice using the OUTKAST Imagination framework. Students then engage with musical concepts from a computing perspective and implement them using EarSketch, a web-based, learn-to-code through music remixing platform developed at Georgia Tech. In this paper, we present a description of the Your Voice is Power Curriculum and results from an evaluation study. The curriculum overview includes a description of the content and activities, as well as a discussion of the frameworks and theories underlying the curriculum's development. We also present results from a program evaluation covering both a pilot and a full implementation of this newly developed curriculum during the 2020-2021 academic year. Participating high school students and teachers were recruited to respond to online surveys regarding their awareness of and interest in computing, music, and social justice, and their experiences in the competition. Teachers felt that competition participation conferred a variety of benefits to their students and expressed positive attitudes around the social justice focus of the curriculum. Students provided largely positive feedback on the competition and reported a positive impact on their understanding of social justice and equity. Students also demonstrated high levels of understanding of the ubiquity of coding skills and applications. Taken together, program evaluation results show that this integration of themes is effective in engaging students in difficult conversations about race while building interest in computing.

Music, Coding, and Equity: An Exploration of Student and Teacher Experiences in Decoding Messaging and Discussing Equity with the "Your Voice Is Power" Curriculum

2024 · 1 citations

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science

Abstract Your Voice is Power is a curriculum that seeks to promote racial equity and increase interest in computing careers by integrating elements of computing, music, social justice, self-expression, and entrepreneurship. The curriculum consists of five modules lasting 60-90 minutes each. Students engage with music through lyrical analysis to extract and explore present themes of social justice using the OUTKAST Imagination framework. Students then engage with musical concepts from a computing perspective to create their own remixes using EarSketch, a web-based, learn-to-code through music platform developed at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). These elements are further supported by discussions around racial justice and the pathways to equity. The program culminates with an optional online competition with student submissions judged by industry professionals. This program has been ongoing since the 2019-2020 school year, and program evaluation efforts have been undertaken since the program's inception. Participatory evaluation framework principles were followed, including a process to obtain input from program leaders and staff to create program goals and a logic model that maps out the program's activities and how these link to the goals. The evaluation includes the collection of data from all program participants (i.e., teachers, students, and judges) via online surveys conducted immediately after the conclusion of the online competition. In these online surveys, we gather participants' feedback on various aspects of the competition, as well as their perspectives on their motivation to participate. Additionally, the survey is designed to measure the impact that program participation has had on them (and on their students, in the case of teacher participants). Program evaluation results from the first two years have suggested that, in general, participants in all three groups find Your Voice is Power to be a valuable experience, one they would repeat and/or recommend to a friend or colleague. For the year three data collection, following the past years' evaluation findings, we further investigated two areas of interest to program leaders: 1) students' experiences with a framework (the OUTKAST Imagination framework) [1] included in the curriculum to guide students through a detailed analysis of a song's lyrics and their meaning, and 2) teachers' self-efficacy for and attitudes around teaching on racial equity-related topics, including the specific pedagogical approaches non-racist teaching, culturally relevant teaching, and anti-racist teaching. This paper will present the results of the current evaluation with a specific focus on these two newly added areas of inquiry. Results indicate that students and teachers found lyric analysis and the OUTKAST Imagination framework to be a useful and valuable tool, and that teachers are generally comfortable with, and seek opportunities for, teaching on race-related topics, but they vary in their self-efficacy for specific pedagogical approaches to teaching on race-related topics.

Your Voice is Power: Integrating Computing, Music, Entrepreneurship, and Social Justice Learning

2021 · 1 citations

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence

Computational thinking has become pervasive across many technical and creative disciplines. Creating a computationally literate workforce capable of recognizing and eliminating algorithmic discrimination requires diverse perspectives and lived experiences. Diversity within computing is a persistent problem; in 2014, several large tech companies released diversity reports and made commitments to improvement. As of 2020, improvements have been minor, especially for Black employees. Compared to US demographics, the percentage of Black and Latinx students pursuing degrees in computing remains low, even as numbers improve in STEM more broadly. It is more important than ever to prioritize a diverse computing workforce and a computationally literate workforce, more broadly, whose interests reside with equitable outcomes.

Utilizing Evidence-Centered Design to Develop Assessments: A High School Introductory Computer Science Course

Frontiers in Education · 2021 · 8 citations

• Computer Science
• Computer Science
• Knowledge management

Evidence-centered design (ECD) is an assessment framework tailored to provide structure and rigor to the assessment development process, and also to generate evidence of assessment validity by tightly coupling assessment tasks with focal knowledge, skills, and abilities (FKSAs). This framework is particularly well-suited to FKSAs that are complex and multi-part (Mislevy and Haertel, 2006), as is the case with much of the focal content within the computer science (CS) domain. This paper presents an applied case of ECD used to guide assessment development in the context of a redesigned introductory CS curriculum. In order to measure student learning of CS skills and content taught through the curriculum, knowledge assessments were written and piloted. The use of ECD provided an organizational framework for assessment development efforts, offering assessment developers a clear set of steps with accompanying documentation and decision points, as well as providing robust validity evidence for the assessment. The description of an application of ECD for assessment development within the context of an introductory CS course illustrates its utility and effectiveness, and also provides a guide for researchers carrying out related work.