Page 152 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

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Chapter 7
teaching and assessment strategies and students’ understanding; and teachers’ ideas about teaching modeling and simulation have not been charted either. Therefore, the aim of our research project is to explore the pedagogical aspects of teaching Computational Science in the Computer Science course in secondary education.
We looked both at the pedagogical aspects of teaching of Computational Science (i.e., modeling and simulation) and at teachers’ practical knowledge about these pedagogical aspects through the lens of Magnusson’s (1999) components of topic-specific pedagogy — that is, in terms of:
M1 goals and objectives
M2 students’ understanding including requirements for learning and
their difficulties
M3 instructional strategies
M4 methods of assessment.
We translated this global aim of our research project into these four research questions:
RQ1 What computational thinking activities constitute the problem- solving process associated with Computational Science? This question aims to find an operational definition of the learning goals and objectives of Computational Science. (M1)
RQ2 How can the students’ understanding of modeling activities be portrayed in terms of their requirements for learning and difficulties they encounter? (M2)
RQ3 What are characteristics of a valid and reliable assessment instrument for Computational Science? (M4)
RQ4 How can the teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) for teaching Computational Science be portrayed in terms of the four components M1 to M4?
7.2.1 Operational Definition of Computational Science (RQ1)
The first empirical study (chapter 3) focused on obtaining an operational definition of the learning objectives modeling and simulation — Magnusson’s component M1 — to answer our first research question: What computational thinking activities constitute the problem-solving process associated with Computational Science (i.e., modeling and simulation)?