by Claire Miller
College of Education & Human Development Associate Professor Lauren Margulieux, Assistant Professor Yin-Chan Liao and Department of Learning Sciences Chair Brendan Calandra have received a one-year, $418,509 National Science Foundation grant to incorporate computing skills into collegiate teacher education programs.
In this grant, entitled, “Micro-Credentials for Integrating Computing Responsibly into Other (MICRO) Domains in Colleges of Education,” they will work with co-principal investigator Mike Karlin from California State University - Dominguez Hills, plus four teacher education faculty members and 1,500 education students across four partner institutions: California State University - Dominguez Hills, North Carolina State University, Southern Connecticut State University and the University of Virginia.
The grant team will demonstrate how the College of Education & Human Development (CEHD) at Georgia State added computing across its teacher preparation programs – which was made possible by two previous National Science Foundation grants and funding from Snap Inc. and Google – and implement computing resources developed in the CEHD at the four partner institutions so that they can replicate the CEHD’s work.
During the one-year grant period, researchers will study each university’s needs and identify how to customize methods for teaching computing skills to future educators from different disciplines and in different contexts.
This grant not only encourages teachers across subject areas and grade levels to use computer science in their lessons, but also better prepares K-12 students to use computing skills in a variety of fields.
“Our goal is to enable primarily non-computer science teachers to use computing as a powerful teaching tool in their classrooms, ultimately preparing a more diverse range of people to use computing across a variety of contexts and challenging problems,” the researchers wrote in their grant. “This work enables the faculty in teacher preparation programs to use computing in their programs and gives K-12 students experiences with computing across the curriculum.”
To learn more about the grant, visit https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2241914&HistoricalAwards=false.