A Practical Application of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy in Computer Science

Culturally responsive teaching refers to an approach to teaching and learning that facilitates the achievement of all students by including content that is relatable to all cultures, and creating a culturally-supported and learner-centered environment. The CSE 110 course at ASU would greatly benefit from the incorporation of culturally relevant learning, as it would help them thrive in their chosen field of study while being able to uphold and value cultural relevance. The incorporation of culturally relevant pedagogy would further help students from marginalized communities feel more accepted and capable to thrive in STEM education. We began our research by first understanding the foundations of culturally responsive pedagogy, including how it is currently being used in classrooms. Concurrently, we studied the CSE 110 curriculum to see where we can implement this teaching strategy. Our research helped us develop a set of worksheets. In the second semester of our research we distributed these worksheets and a set of control worksheets. Students were randomly assigned to an experiment or control group each of the four weeks of the study. We then analyzed this information to quantitatively see how culturally responsive pedagogy affects their outcomes. To follow up we also conducted a survey to get some qualitative feedback about student experience. Our final findings consisted of an analysis on how culturally responsive pedagogy affects learning outcomes in an introductory computer science course.