Fostering rural students’ computer science self-efficacy: Insights from a robotics-enhanced language arts curriculum
Broadening rural students’ participation in computer science (CS) education has become imperative to address the nationwide growing demand for CS workforce. Unfortunately, many schools in rural areas still lack the infrastructures and teacher capacity to offer CS courses. Integrating CS content into existing STEM curricula emerges as a viable solution, but rural students have a significant proficiency gap in science and mathematics compared to their urban peers. This exploratory sequential mixed methods study examined the impact of a robotics-based intervention integrated into a high school language arts class on rural students’ CS self-efficacy. By utilizing an English language arts course as the context for CS integration, this study aimed to broaden student participation in CS education and empower students with coding skills alongside their reading and writing abilities. Quantitative findings confirmed that the integrated robotics-based intervention significantly improved rural students’ CS self-efficacy. Qualitative findings provided supplemental insights on how the mastery experience facilitated by the robotics-based intervention fostered rural students’ CS self-efficacy. The findings of this study shed light on the potential of integrating robotics-based curriculum in language arts classes to enhance rural students’ CS self-efficacy, thus advancing efforts to promote the equity and diversity of CS education.