Page 163 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

Concerning the knowledge about instructional strategies (M3), we described it in terms of five issues: the perceived role as teachers, assignments to be given to students, student’s characteristic to be taken into account, organizational aspects, and finally, difficulties and problems. We observed an agreement about subject- specific strategies — scaffolding learning with a final project which serves both to give students the opportunity to learn how to develop a model from scratch and as assessment.
Concerning the knowledge about assessment (M4), we described it in terms of four issues: the form of the assignment, problems given to students to work on, organizational issues, and finally, the assessment criteria. We observed an agreement about a suitable assessment form — a large practical assignment. Furthermore, we found great variation in the knowledge of dimension to assess, and in granularity and depth of the description of assessment criteria.
Additionally, we described two characteristics that distinguish among teachers — their focus on conceptual versus motivational and practical learning goals and objectives (M1) and their emphasis on product-based versus process-based assessment (M4) — leading to four distinct groups of teachers. However, none of these differential features leads to an overall typification of the teachers’ PCK.
The construct of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has proven to be a
powerful one to help capture teachers’ views and knowledge on teaching various
topics, for example in science (Henze et al., 2008), mathematics (Baumert et
al., 2010) or design of digital artifacts (Rahimi et al., 2016). It is finding its way
into the CS teaching as well. In a review of research literature, Hubbard (2018)
reports 19 studies concerned with PCK in computing education specifically 7 concerned with teaching computing as its own subject, and these studies are
mostly concerned with programming, cf. Saeli (2012). A number of other studies which are concerned with teachers’ PCK of computer science or computational thinking focus on programming as well (Yadav et al., 2016; Yadav & Berges, 2019) or specifically on programming in the context of robotics (Çakıroğlu & Kiliç, 2020; Chalmers, 2018). Our study seems to be unique with its focus on the PCK of modeling and simulation in the context of CS education. Yet, we can compare the findings about our teachers’ PCK to the results of our studies on students’ understanding and draw parallels with other studies of teachers’ PCK related to CS or modeling.
Our studies on students’ understanding confirmed that students indeed faced difficulties related to understanding the nature of models and found abstraction
General Conclusions and Discussion
161