Page 165 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

programming education and novice programmers. However, we are not aware of research about employing programming skills to develop computational models which are used for scientific enquiry in the context of CS education. It is in this light that we see the scientific contribution of this project to the development of the theory of the CS education. Our work provides a novel theoretical framework for empirical research into computational modeling competences, principles for their assessment and insights into students’ understanding regarding these competences. Furthermore, it is the first instance where the related teachers’ PCK is explored.
7.3 Reflection on Methodology
In this section, we reflect on the methods applied in our research project.
To explore the pedagogical aspects of teaching Computational Science, we employed the lens of Magnusson’s (1999) components of topic-specific pedagogy. This approach allowed us to organize and structure our research project and investigate pedagogy in a feasible manner. Furthermore, our project provides evidence that Magnusson’s view of components of topic-specific pedagogy can successfully be applied in the context of CS education as well.
We carried out this research project with a limited number of participants.
The participating teachers were from the local CS teachers’ network who replied
to our invitation to be interviewed and were in that sense self-selected. However,
we believe that this fact did not influence our findings significantly because
this sample was still reasonably representative for the whole of the CS teacher 7 population in the Netherlands regarding teachers’ own educational background,
teaching qualifications, and experience with teaching (as described in chapter
2). The same holds true for the students from the two schools participating in
the project. As a consequence of the centralized and regulated way the Dutch
education is set up — especially in the upper grades of HAVO and VWO — the
cognitive abilities of all of the students attending these types of school are expected
to be fairly uniform (see chapter 2 for a description of Dutch educational system).
We believe that working with a small sample and familiarity with the teaching circumstances provided us with better understanding of what was going on in
the classroom and made it possible to perform in-depth qualitative analysis of the
teachers’ ideas on teaching and of students’ learning.
General Conclusions and Discussion
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