Page 49 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education
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Twenty Years of Computer Science in Dutch Secondary Education
sharing and working on projects, were difficult to examine in a national exam. Therefore, a national exam could, just as in the case of many other school subjects, contain about 60% of the curriculum (Schmidt, 2007).
CS teachers were obviously not in favor of a national exam, but they were not
the only party involved in this discussion. Universities did advocate one. National 2 politics, with its tendency to want to exercise a controlling influence on the output
quality of secondary education, saw a national exam as a suitable instrument to
do just that.
Still another discussion surrounding CS was the question of whether to make CS compulsory. A slight majority of CS teachers thought that CS should be compulsory in the lower grades of secondary education so that students would have a better picture of this subject when they choose their profile and the curriculum to follow from the tenth grade on. CS in the higher grades would then be able to consist of several modules, since the students would already have a foundation to build on. In addition, this would create a continuous trajectory from elementary school all the way through to the higher grades of secondary education. About one quarter of the teachers, however, were opposed to this idea. Other scenarios, such as a common core course for all students, with separate modules for each profile, or even a distinct CS course for each of the profiles, can count on roughly equal numbers of advocates and opponents, or just simply a majority of opponents.
As of the fall of 2007, education in the higher grades of secondary education in the Netherlands has once again been subjected to certain modifications. The leitmotif was that schools should be granted more autonomy and choice in the way they organize education, and so make the whole of education more manageable for schools through, among other things, streamlining the amount of time each course is allocated. Again, these modifications were favorable for CS course in general and for individual schools in particular. To begin with, the hours allocated to the whole of the CS course increased to 320 for senior secondary education and 440 for pre-university education. Furthermore, the curricula for all the subjects have been simplified so as to decrease the number of terms, and the terms themselves are no longer described in such great detail. For CS this means that, following recommendations based on classroom experience (Hartsuijker & Westland, 2004), no new terms have been added. The result was that the new curriculum consisted of the eighteen terms listed in section 2.2.1.4.
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