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Twenty Years of Computer Science in Dutch Secondary Education
• suitable for both the HAVO and the VWO students, yet provide for their differences
• suitable to be published online
• accompanied by teachers’ instruction and a suitable form of
assessment (e.g. a test or a practical assignment). 2 When a module is finished, it should be tested in at least two schools. The
feedback from the teachers and their students who engage in testing of a module
should then be collected, and a new version of a module should be written.
The final version of the module should be presented to an external expert and
a certifying body for final approval. This certification serves as quality control
in multiple ways, not the least to partly compensate the lack of a national exam
and corresponding lack of quality control and lack of ways to compare students’
achievements across different schools.
2.3.4.2 Development of Teaching Materials for Computational Science
This process is illustrated with the example of teaching materials being developed for the elective theme R: Computational Science which is the focal point of this thesis. As a teacher educator specialized in didactics of CS and a researcher, I lead a team developing teaching materials and assessment for Computational Science. The results of the research presented in this thesis — the operationalization of the intended learning outcomes of Computational Science, suggestions for suitable data sources to monitor students’ learning outcomes, awareness of students’ challenges when engaging in modeling activities (all described in section 3.5), teachers’ ideas and suggestions about instruction and assessment as well as our insight into their PCK (described in section 4.3), together with our assessment instrument (described in chapter 5) — supplemented with the decision to employ the 4C-ID instructional design (Kirschner & Merriënboer, 2008), form the starting points for the team and thus insure that the teaching materials, accompanying assessment instruments and teachers’ manuals will be set up upon solid theoretical foundations. All aspects of the implementation in schools will be monitored closely and will form the input for further research into the teaching and learning of Computational Science.
2.3.5 Research
During the last decade, CS education research (CSER) in the Netherlands was given a new impulse with the appointment of the first full professor in CS
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