Page 84 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

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Chapter 4
2. What differential features of PCK can be used to identify patterns of individual PCK in terms of the four components of PCK?
The answer to the first question will serve as input to the second question that seeks to determine whether it is possible to recognize distinct types of PCK and subsequently match each teacher’s PCK to one of these types.
Our findings will serve as input for the subsequent studies on designing teaching materials and assessment instruments, the development of teachers’ PCK, and they will contribute to the development of teacher training courses.
4.1.2 Related Work
The construct of PCK has proven to be a powerful one to help capture teachers’ views and knowledge on teaching various topics — both in STEM and in other disciplines — such as models and modeling in science (Justi & Gilbert, 2002) and as a part of public understanding of science (Henze et al., 2007), programing in CS (M. Saeli, 2012) and designing digital artifacts in CS (Rahimi et al., 2016), to expose the relation between the quality of teachers’ PCK and their subject matter knowledge (M. Saeli, 2012; Sanders et al., 1993) to explore the PCK repertoire of beginning teachers (E. Lee et al., 2007) and to chart the development of teacher’s PCK as the experience with teaching a particular topics increases (Henze et al., 2008).
We investigate PCK through the lens of the operational description of the intended learning outcomes of the learning objective Computational Science obtained in our previous study, describing the modeling cycle for simulation modeling through its elements purpose, research, abstraction, formulation, requirements/specification, implementation, verification/validation, experiment, analysis, and reflection obtained in our first study (see chapter 3.4).
4.2 Method
We conducted individual semi-structured interviews with ten CS teachers from the local CS teachers’ network who replied to our invitation to be interviewed. Four of the teachers have an CS background and three of these are qualified teachers with an MSc degree in CS education while the fourth one is still studying to get this qualification. Out of the other six teachers, one has no teacher qualification, one is qualified for mathematics only, and other four are qualified