Page 86 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

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Chapter 4
• M4: Knowledge of assessment
How do you intend to assess your students’ learning and achievement during their modeling projects? (Rahimi et al., 2016) How do you intend to establish whether your students reached the learning goals with regard to modeling and simulation? How would you know? (Henze et al., 2007)
The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. We first coded the transcripts using the coding categories derived from our operational description of modeling: purpose, research, abstraction, formulation, requirements/specification, implementation, verification/validation, experiment, analysis, and reflection obtained in our first study (see chapter 3). We then classified the interview transcripts using Magnusson’s four components of PCK (Magnusson et al., 1999) as main coding categories. Within these categories, we applied inductive coding to characterize the teachers’ responses. In an axial coding process (Cohen et al., 2007), the codes were grouped and merged where necessary. We used the codes to describe the teachers’ PCK in the results section (section 4.3). In a subsequent analysis, we tried to identify differential features in terms of Magnusson’s components M1 through M4 in order to typify teachers’ individual PCK.
4.3 Results
In this section, we first present the results of our characterization of the teachers’ PCK organized around the four components of PCK (M1 through M4). Subsequently, we then explore differential features in order to distinguish types of teachers’ PCK.
4.3.1 Knowledge about Goals and Objectives (M1)
No teacher has taught Computational Science as a separate topic in the context of the CS course yet and only one of them taught system dynamics modeling in a physics course. Since we did not enquire about the modeling process explicitly, we performed a detailed analysis of the interviews through the lens of our theoretical framework on the modeling cycle and thus reconstructed the teachers’ content knowledge (CK) pertaining to the aspects of Computational Science obtained in our first study (see chapter 3), as shown in Table 4.