Page 53 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

Twenty Years of Computer Science in Dutch Secondary Education
change the CS curriculum. In this section we present the data that were collected
concerning the teachers and their ideas about desired curriculum changes. and
in the section on the curriculum (section 2.3.2), we report extensively about the
results of this inquiry (Tolboom et al., 2014). Regarding the teachers themselves,
89% are male and 11% are female. Almost two out of three are the sole CS teachers 2 in their schools, with 31% of schools having two teachers and 4% having three
teachers. The majority — 55% — teaches another subject as well, both in science (mostly mathematics) and in humanities and other subjects (e.g. geography, history, economy, arts and languages). When teaching CS, almost two-thirds of them cooperate with the teachers of other subjects, mostly physics, mathematics and business, but also from other sciences, humanities and, notably, arts. Most of the teachers — 62% — have been teaching CS for more than six years. Concerning education they attended to qualify them to teach CS, 52% of the teachers said they attended the CODI in-service program (see the first part of this chapter), 18% followed a university educational master, and 36% did something else. Since these numbers add up to more than 100%, we suspect that a number of teachers took several educational routes. Most teachers actively engage in staying up-to-date by following in-service training courses (67%), participating in teacher networks (65%), reading professional literature (81%) and engaging in other activities (39%). Still, most of them — 62% — find the in-service training courses offered to be insufficient and see that as a problem threatening the quality of CS as a school subject (Tolboom et al., 2014).
When it comes to teaching materials they use, we see that the online books offered by the three publishers are often combined with each other and with other teaching material, either found elsewhere or written by the teachers themselves (Tolboom et al., 2014). Competitions have made their way into the classroom too: The CS Olympiad13 including CodeCup14 and the international Bebras competition (Dagienė & Stupuriene, 2016a).
When asked about their opinion on the CS curriculum, 7% of the teachers said they were not familiar with it. One out of four teachers did not find it useful, 38% would like it to contain less or other learning objectives, and 36% were satisfied with it. When asked what learning objectives to strike from the curriculum, almost half of the teachers — 45% — said none but added that they would like the curriculum to offer more guidance. Other teachers, those wishing to strike some learning objectives, most often mentioned those related to business aspects
13 http://www.informaticaolympiade.nl 14 http://www.codecup.nl/intro.php
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