Page 50 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

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Chapter 2
There was more good news for CS. Not only were schools being given total freedom in designing their assessment procedures, they were also being encouraged to teach topics that extend, deepen, and go beyond the curriculum terms (Tweede Fase Adviespunt, 2006).
And last but not least, there is news from the research side. The Technical University of Eindhoven (TUE) and the Open University of the Netherlands have begun a research project to analyze and summarize the relevant research literature for pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for CS teachers and to link this PCK to practice in the Dutch classroom. The aim is to create an inventory of research- based best-practice characteristics.
In spite of all this good news for the CS course in general, the prospects for a bright future were hampered by various problems.
The publishers of two of the three textbooks (Bergervoet et al., 2001; Meijer et al., 2001) have decided to cease publication of their textbooks. The authors of these textbooks took steps to continue development of the teaching materials and to make them available online. There were university-based projects aimed at developing teaching materials as well. However, together these initiatives did not provide enough teaching material to meet the needs of the increased number of study hours, leaving the teachers to their own devices once again.
There were many non-licensed teachers teaching CS –—an estimated two out of five — the same as was reported in Israel back in the 1990’s (Gal-Ezer, 1995), and this situation did not look like it was going to be changing any time soon (Schmidt, 2007). Despite the fact that since the fall of 2006 there were five universities in the Netherlands — Utrecht University, University of Groningen, University of Twente, Delft University of Technology and Eindhoven University of Technology— where one could become a licensed secondary education CS teacher, the numbers of students did not nearly match the demand from schools. The reasons for this were numerous and complex. In order to become a licensed CS teacher, as a rule one needs to have a Bachelor’s degree in CS, and then follow a Master’s in Education and Communication. Almost none of the CS Bachelor’s students took this route because a career in education was often perceived as being of low social status, coupled with low pay and presenting almost no career prospects, while the booming economy had so much more to offer. On top of all that, a typical school did not have enough weekly CS lessons scheduled to offer full-time employment to a CS teacher. On the other hand, a lot of the people who did want to become licensed CS teachers had an IT background and/or were