National Comprehensive Center Technical Assistance Project

The National Comprehensive Center provides capacity-building services to state and local education agencies to address high-leverage problems in education. SRI International provides technical assistance products and services across multiple content areas, including science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and computer science (CS).

The National Comprehensive Center works with states and regional centers to enhance the quality of instruction close achievement gaps and improve educational outcomes for all students. To this end, the center delivers high-quality, universal and targeted capacity-building services and products, and works with key education stakeholders to leverage expertise and resources and, ultimately, maximize results. The National Comprehensive Center identifies and addresses pressing education needs and trends, common high-leverage problems, and high-frequency challenges faced by states and the regional centers that serve them.It provides products and services to support capacity building within states. SRI collaborates with Westat and other partners in multiple content areas, including STEM and CS.

The Designing for Diversity whitepaper series proposes a fresh approach to designing and/or modifying instructional materials that address diversity by purposefully and systemically integrating equity and inclusion principles from the very beginning of curriculum design. The three papers in the series cover:

Why current approaches to designing STEM and +CS curricula are inadequate
A definition of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the context of curriculum design
An introduction to The Equity and Inclusion Framework for Curriculum Design (EI-CD) approach for designing and adapting STEM and CS curriculum materials to meet the needs of diverse students.

InformCS provides a whitepaper that highlights some of the challenges faced by current CS teachers and presents a call to action for states and school districts. That call consists of a request to support CS teacher capacity building through standards-aligned, sustained, scalable, and reusable professional development for teachers that focuses on promoting their CS formative assessment literacy as a way to improve their ability to effectively teach CS. The practice guide that comes along with it provides concrete steps to systematically develop or select formative assessment tasks and use them to develop teaching methods.