Empowering Teachers to CT-ify the Science Classroom: Moving from Educational Technology to Computational Thinking

Bain, Connor

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-gtxr-x440

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Empowering Teachers to CT-ify the Science Classroom: Moving from Educational Technology to Computational Thinking

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We live in an increasingly computational world; one that, in the near term, may require everyone to be computationally literate. Computer science (CS) education has greatly increased its reach in the last two decades with an increasing number of students having access to formal computer science classroom experiences in the K-12 space. Despite the obvious economic and cognitive benefits of pursuing computational learning experiences, CS still struggles to provide equitable access to deep computational learning experience students in K-12 schools. Many have begun to argue for a new, more general approach to computing education, namely, computational thinking (CT) education. This more abstract approach to computing education has becoming increasingly popular, particularly within the Next Generation Science Standards where one of its key practices is Using Mathematics and Computational Thinking.The CT-STEM Project at Northwestern University is based on decades of research that shows that computational tools can be used to enhance STEM content learning as well as teach computational practices. Through interviews with STEM professionals, the project developed a framework of CT-STEM practices that these professionals considered integral to the actual practice of science. By integrating these practices into existing STEM classrooms, the project aims to 1. Make science learning more authentic; 2. Deepen scientific content learning; and 3. Broaden participation in computing. However simply creating new CT-ified curricula is not enough to fundamentally center CT as a learning goal in the classroom. We must additionally study how teacher practice can be adapted to support both STEM and CT learning in these classrooms. This dissertation uses a mixed-methods, ethnographic approach to study three different components of teacher practice–planning, enacting, and reflecting–in these newly CT-ified classrooms. We focus our attention on first how an in-service high school teacher might adapt their classroom practice in these new spaces and then use this analysis to inform the design of teacher tools to allow future teachers to do the same. Teachers participated in an intense 4-week co-design professional development program during which they designed CT-ified curricula that also covered existing content goals in their classrooms. Through a qualitative analysis of these units, we show that teachers design a variety of computational experiences for their students, though we also identify a number of opportunities for additional CT-ification across the various STEM disciplines which we then transform into usable teacher tools. Using classroom audio data as well as daily teacher surveys, we then shift our attention to teachers’ enactment of the curricula, finding evidence that teachers see CT and STEM as supportive, rather than conflicting, learning objectives in their classrooms. Finally, we move to analyzing how teachers reflected on both their own practice as well as student learning in the classroom, discovering that teachers attended to student work that involved computational thinking, but teachers did not feel comfortable assessing students’ CT learning. However, we also find that teachers still felt that they were able to achieve their usual STEM learning goals, demonstrating that CT and STEM can in fact coexist in the classroom. This work contributes to our understanding of how STEM classrooms might be leveraged as a way of engaging students in computation outside of formal computer science learning experiences. Additionally, we contribute to the growing body of teacher tools to enable this CT-ification of existing classrooms to achieve our goals of making science education more authentic, deepening students’ relationship with scientific content, and broadening participation in computing.

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