Page 164 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

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Chapter 7
and formalization challenging, exactly as reported by teachers. Furthermore, teachers were right about the inefficient students’ strategies. However, where teachers in our study mentioned no misconceptions, we did find them, for example, related to the nature of models.
We now go on to reflect on the method used for this study. Considering the explorative character of our study, we felt that a qualitative research method was appropriate to capture the whole breadth of teachers’ opinions and ideas. Therefore, we conducted semi-structured interviews with our teachers as did, for example, Liberman et al., (2012) and Griffin (2016), rather than, for example, present teachers with teaching vignettes with close-ended responses and focus on students’ understanding only (cf. Yadav & Berges (2019)). Our research yields portraits of CS teachers’ PCK and, unlike Saeli (2012), we refrain from assessing their PCK.
Rahimi et al. (2016), performed a study with similar methodology when they explored PCK of Dutch CS teachers regarding the design of digital artifacts. Their findings describe teachers’ PCK in terms similar to the ones we found. However, unlike them, we were not able to typify teachers’ PCK through relating their knowledge of students’ understanding and instructional strategies on one hand, to their knowledge of goals and objectives and knowledge of assessment on the other. Henze et al. (2007) explored science teachers PCK on models and modeling, also in the context of the Dutch secondary education. They, too, were able to distinguish two types of teacher knowledge. If we speculate about the reasons why, in our case, we were not able to identify specific types of teacher knowledge, we should consider the novelty of modeling and simulation in the context of CS education, and teachers’ lack of experience in teaching it. So, while Rahimi et al. (2016) saw that certain components of PCK were predictive of other components, in our case there is a lot of variation and not much consistency among various components of teachers’ PCK which suggests the reasons why we could not establish such typification.
7.2.5 Overall Contribution
Computer science, teaching CS and research into the teaching of CS are rather young disciplines, especially when compared to, for example, mathematics. As we indicated in the introduction of this thesis (see chapter 1), computational thinking — and its component modeling and simulation — can form a bridge between CS and an application domain. A lot of research in CS education is dedicated to