story by Claire Miller
To ensure that all teacher education students learn computing concepts, some universities have created computer science education electives or incorporated computing into their required educational technology courses.
Several College of Education & Human Development faculty decided to try a different approach: Designing computing activities that could be added to teaching methods courses for English language arts, mathematics and science education students.
Faculty members Lauren Margulieux, Patrick Enderle, Pier Junor Clarke, Natalie King, Caroline Sullivan, Michelle Zoss and Joyce Many co-authored an article in the Journal of Computer Science Integration on this approach and how it impacts teacher education students’ computing knowledge and how they integrate computing in their disciplines.
For this study, English language arts, mathematics and science education students completed a one-hour, virtual module on computational thinking, and then spent a week in their teaching methods classes learning about computing activities that Margulieux helped the CEHD faculty members design for their respective disciplines.
“One of the primary goals of this work is to better understand how computer science can be useful to people who are not computer scientists, much like how we teach math and science to people who won't go into those fields,” Margulieux said. “A benefit of working with people from different disciplines is to figure out what is universally useful across different types of problem-solving processes and skill sets.”
Teacher education students completed surveys at three different intervals – before the online computational thinking module, after the module, and after the week-long instruction on computing activities for the individual disciplines. The researchers also collected student reflections during the module (and after some students’ student teaching experiences), reviewed computing activity assignments and incorporated notes Margulieux took during the week-long instruction and the student teaching experiences.
Before any of the students completed the module or instruction, 42 of the 99 participating students said they might have heard or definitely hadn’t heard of computational thinking before, and participants had a wide range of definitions for computational thinking. However, their survey responses on computational thinking became more technically correct and nuanced after the module and week of instruction.
“Some of the best things we learned about teaching computing integration is to connect new information about computer science to teachers' prior experiences,” Margulieux said. “Computer science is a field built upon principles from science, math and language, and teachers already know a lot about these fields that can help them understand computing.”
Students also initially expressed concerns about being able to successfully lead a computing activity in a classroom, but they became more confident after their module and week of instruction. When asked the question, “I am confident that I could integrate computational thinking into my future classroom,” with a scale of “1 – Not at all” to “5 – Completely,” students’ average scores rose from 3.55 (before any instruction) to 3.85 (after the online module) to 4.07 (after the week of instruction).
Teacher education students also resonated with the idea of “treating computer programming as teaching the computer,” Margulieux said. “Writing a program is basically teaching the computer how to solve a problem or do a task, and teaching is a good way to learn. Computers are particularly good learners because they allow you to try as many times as you want without getting tired or frustrated or misunderstanding you. So, if you can teach a computer how to do something, then you must understand it very well.”