Page 57 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

Twenty Years of Computer Science in Dutch Secondary Education
3. in-service training of the teachers;
4. training of adequate numbers of new teachers (Tolboom et al., 2014).
Within weeks of the publication of this report, the government appointed a
committee of nine members — teachers, CS specialists, experts from higher
education, and curriculum and assessment specialists —to redesign the CS 2 curricula for the HAVO and VWO types of schools, that was formulated as follows:
• The committee’s task is to design a new curriculum for the elective course CS in the upper grades of HAVO and VWO types of school.
• The purpose of the new curricula is to enhance the quality of this course by updating and modernizing the its learning objectives.
• The curricula need to be formulated globally: for the teachers it
needs to be clear what the curricular goals are, while at the same
time the schools keep sufficient room for their own interpretation.
• There is sufficient distinction between the HAVO and VWO
curricula without them being two separate curricula.
• Each curriculum contains a number of compulsory core components and elective components. The elective components are related to the educational tracks the students follow (either one of the two humanities tracks or one of the two science tracks), yet they are within reach of all the students choosing CS, regardless of the track
they actually follow.
• The curriculum design is to follow the context-concept approach. Furthermore, when formulating the new curriculum, the committee needs to
take into account the following requirements: The assessment should remain as it is, consisting of a school exam only and no national exam. This curriculum is to be aligned with the curricula in lower secondary and primary education, which are to be developed in the near future. The study load needs to remain the same. The curriculum should not be overloaded and it must be possible to implement it within the available time. The curriculum does not favor any particular didactical approach; it describes the “what” and not the “how”. The new curriculum needs to be able to count on the wide support of the teacher community. The textbook publishers need to be kept informed on the progress in order to enable them to prepare the teaching materials in time (Opdracht vernieuwingscommissie informatica 2014-2015, 2014).
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