Reimagining Standards for Computer Science Education for Primary and Secondary Schools

The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) K-12 Standards were last updated in 2017, when only six states in the United States had adopted learning standards for primary and secondary education (K-12) computer science. Fast forward to 2024, and 41 states now have K-12 CS standards (and one has high school CS standards only). In preparation for writing an updated set of standards, CSTA is engaging in three stages of work: reimagining CS for high school students, conducting a crosswalk of K-12 CS standards across all 50 states compared to the CSTA standards (2017), and engaging in the technical process of defining final standards content via research and revision. All three stages draw significantly from the community of practitioners, researchers, curriculum designers, postsecondary faculty, and other interested parties. They also draw significantly from research published since the last revision to take into account the current evidence on learning computer science. In this poster, we describe our process for building the groundwork of knowledge for revising the standards, share highlights of the results to date, and describe how this data will be used to inform the upcoming revision of the CSTA standards.