Abstract

There has been a limited number of studies in which a computing curriculum is designed and developed for students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), and there has been no study to test the effectiveness of an accessible computing curriculum for students with ASD. Therefore, the objectives of this study are 1) to implement an accessible computing curriculum at an inner-city school for seventh-grade students with ASD, and 2) evaluate the effectiveness of the accessible curriculum in improving students with ASDs’ learning of computational thinking concepts (CTCs) (sequences, loops, parallelism, conditionals, operators, and data) and their development of fluency in computational thinking practices (CTPs) (experimenting, iterating, testing, debugging, reusing and remixing, abstracting, and modularizing) by comparing two groups of twenty-two students; one group taught utilizing the adjusted curriculum and the other utilizing the original curriculum. Students' CTCs were measured by analyzing both groups' pretest and posttest scores, and their CTPs were measured by their artifact-based interview scores.

Citation

Arslanyilmaz, A., Briley, M., Boerio, G., Loto, M.B. & Petridis, K. (2022). The Effectiveness of an Accessible Computing Curriculum. In E. Langran (Ed.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 12-17). San Diego, CA, United States: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved July 7, 2022 from https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/220702/.

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