The EIR Project
Computer science empowers students to create the world of tomorrow.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
About
"Extending the Computer Science Pipeline" is a 6-year research grant from the United States Department of Education funded through the Office of Elementary & Secondary Education's Education Innovation and Research program. The Rutgers University Center for Effective School Practices will work alongside middle schools in New Jersey towards authentic, rigorous, and engaging computer science education programs. Through these school partnerships, CESP work to develop schools' capacity to gather and use data and research evidence to drive educational innovation: skills that educators can transfer and scale well beyond the scope of this project. The project both creates a blueprint for school partnerships and supports and works to broaden participation of underserved student populations. The Center will also work alongside an evaluation team to assess the project's usefulness and efficacy to key educational stakeholders.
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Throughout the project period, the EIR project will work directly with middle school teachers and administrators to define educational goals and initiatives, co-create intentional implementation plans that consider school capacity, resource allocation, and information use, and carry out meaningful changes to CSE while iteratively gathering and responding to data. During their participation, schools have access to the expertise of researchers and professors from a large research university, a library of procedures, tools, and research-based strategies, and as-needed professional learning addressing both CS content and pedagogical knowledge, as well as key skills for driving educational improvement.
The Center for Effective School Practices
The Center for Effective School Practices (CESP) is an equity-focused unit of the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University dedicated to excellence and integrity in research and evaluation. Rutgers CESP regularly engages in and mediates collaborations among public and private school districts in the tri-state area, institutions of higher education, local, state, and federal government agencies, community organizations, and industry partners to generate and implement practitioner-relevant best-practices in education.
CESP is strongly committed to connecting a broad range of education stakeholders with the best available research evidence to inform sound education policy and practice decisions needed to support the delivery of quality education to all students while closing persistent achievement gaps. To this end, CESP supports active collaborative structures such as professional learning communities and researcher-practitioner partnerships, in addition to translating and disseminating evidence-based guidelines and delivering professional development opportunities. The center is also evaluating a number of pre- and post-doctoral training initiatives and working as research partners on an exploration of the use of research-evidence in policy ecosystems. CESP is supported by a robust team of experienced researchers and evaluators with a strong commitment to building the capacity of educators and policymakers to develop and deliver high-quality evidence-based instruction, curriculum, programs, and policy initiatives with significant potential to improve learning for all students while directly addressing existing inequities and systemic bias in education.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, and State and Federal Departments of Education, CESP develops and executes innovative and impactful projects on educational initiatives in addition to serving as internal and external evaluators on large-scale research projects. A current focus of CESP’s work is on scalable mechanisms for improving equity and access to robust computer science education across the K-12 continuum. We work to build the capacity of educators through sustained, inquiry-driven collaboration designed to equip teams of educators with skills they need to effectively plan and implement educational change, including considering the way that data are gathered and intentionally mobilized to hone efforts, carefully curating and translating resources and research evidence into practice, and leveraging elements of partnerships to work efficiently within each schools' circumstances.