Page 29 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

As announced earlier, we will use Magnusson’s (1999) components M1 to 1 M4 to characterize these pedagogical aspects, as well as the respective categories
within teachers’ PCK.
M1 goals and objectives
M2 students’ understanding (including requirements for learning
and their difficulties)
M3 instructional strategies
M4 methods of assessment.
We translate our main objective into four research questions:
RQ1 What computational thinking activities constitute the problem- solving process associated with Computational Science? This question is 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’ PCK for teaching Computational Science
be portrayed in terms of the four components M1 to M4 of PCK?
We will address instructional strategies for Computational Science (M3) by
designing a learning activity for Computational Science in the context of RQ3.
1.4 Structure of the Dissertation
In this section, we describe the structure of this thesis. We list the studies we performed to depict the context where this research project took place and the studies of the research project themselves, together with specific research questions they aim to answer and how the findings from particular studies inform the consequent studies.
After the introductory chapter, chapter 2 of this thesis reports on a context study portraying the birth and the first decade of the elective computer science course in higher grades of senior secondary education (in Dutch: HAVO) and pre-university education (in Dutch: VWO) in the Netherlands. It sketches the Dutch educational system, the position of computer science within the secondary
Introduction
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