| Abstrakt: |
A school's capacity to offer equitable Computer Science (CS) education is an important component of schools, districts, states, or countries ability to offer effective education, yet it remains the least researched. The new CAPE theoretical framework provides a way to investigate and measure an institution's capacity to offer CS education, who has access to the CS Education offered, who participates (enrolls) in the CS education offered, and the learners' experiences engaging with the CS education. When considering how an intervention may impact a primary or secondary school's capacity to offer CS education, we turned to the CAPE framework and created a logic model (theory of impacts) to disaggregate parts of the intervention that needed to be studied, guided by the research question How can we create a Theory of Impacts for Capacity to explore the equitable distribution of impacts of a multi-school intervention?, we developed the Theory of Impacts-CAPE (ToI-CAPE) model to create a blueprint for hypothesizing the impacts of a specific intervention with the purpose of creating targeted instrumentation and protocols to explore the hypotheses. In this paper, we review the notion of capacity explicitly for high school institutions in the United States, then detail how we used our knowledge of building this model to create a method for understanding the impacts of the intervention with respect to capacity. We also discuss our experiences with this process and provide sufficient detail in this report so others can use our process to explore the broader impacts of educational systems in the US or abroad related to capacity using a similar method for understanding specific intervention impacts. By doing so, this new ToI model can be used by others investigating the impact of an intervention's capacity building efforts to offer CS education, specifically interventions that are within and across multi-school or multi-institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
