Page 52 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

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Chapter 2
2.3 The Second Decade of Computer Science in Dutch Secondary Education
In this second part of the chapter, we report on the second decade of the CS course in Dutch secondary education: it did not become compulsory and no national exam was introduced. However, there was a CS curriculum reform, new technologies have changed our lives in ways unforeseen ten years earlier and these developments have led to a whole new set of discussions and challenges surrounding CS.
Here we focus on the events that led to the curriculum reform, the curriculum itself, the current situation of the CS course, and on other developments related to CS education such as an advised introduction of a foundational module in lower secondary education (KNAW, 2012) focusing on digital literacy. In the Netherlands, digital literacy is considered to consist of four skills: basic ICT-skills, media literacy, information literacy and computational thinking (Thijs et al., 2014b), as described in section 1.2.
2.3.1 Situation in Practice
In this section, we describe the present situation of the CS course in secondary education in the Netherlands. Beginning with the most recent figures from 2017, we present the results of the 2014 research project charting the actual situation in schools, describe the events leading to the new 2019 curriculum, and finally, we discuss the newest developments.
2.3.1.1 Schools, Students and Teachers
Looking at the numbers of schools offering the CS course and numbers of students following it, we see that during the period 2002-2006, out of about 474 independent schools, the percentage of schools that do offer CS was fairly constant at around sixty percent with about ten percent of students following it (Schmidt, 2007), cited in (Grgurina & Tolboom, 2008). In the period 2011-2017 out of approximately 500 schools, the percentage of schools offering CS dropped from 55% to 47%, while the proportion of students following it remained fairly constant at around 11% for HAVO and around 12% for the VWO type of school (DUO, 2018).
In 2013, the government commissioned an inquiry and a report by the Netherlands Institute for Curriculum Development (in Dutch: Stichting leerplanontwikkeling, SLO) to explore the teachers’ ideas about the necessity to