No abstract

Computer science education efforts are expanding across the globe to equip students with the necessary computing skills for today’s digital world. However, preparing students to become literate in computing activities requires the training of tens of thousands of teachers in computer science. The discrepancy between student needs and teacher preparation in computer science has raised questions of quality teachers, particularly for teachers who do not possess adequate content or pedagogical knowledge to teach computer science efficiently. To address this issue, we designed an instrument to measure knowledge needed to teach computer science (i.e., computer science pedagogical content knowledge). Results exhibited that our instrument measured aspects of teachers’ computer science pedagogical content knowledge; however, teachers’ prior background in teaching did not influence their performance. We discuss implications for future research and practice.

No abstract

We present the results of an investigation on how well students are able to understand object-oriented programming (OOP) when learning with only very minimal guidance. We analyzed the source code that the students of a preparatory course produced during the course as well as concept maps that they were asked to draw before and after the course. Our findings show, that there are observable differences between what students know about some concepts and what they're able to do with it. Generally speaking, it seems that several OOP related concepts can be applied successfully without fully understanding the underlying concepts, while others are hard to understand and apply without a significant amount of prior knowledge. This gives rise to the suspicion that it might be possible to apply a concept without having understood it, at least with respect to some algorithmic concepts of CS.

The initiatives to introduce Computer Science as a mandatory subject in K-12 in the U.S. (CSForAll), the U.K. (CAS), or Australia mean that thousands of new teachers will need to be trained both through inservice professional development and preservice teacher preparation. In order to examine the success of these efforts to train new computer science teachers requires computer science education researchers to evaluate the development of knowledge to teach computer science, i.e. pedagogical content knowledge. To date, we know little about how computer science pedagogical content knowledge looks like and how to assess it. This paper reports results from a qualitative analysis of computer science teachers' responses to teaching vignettes about students' understanding of programming constructs. The responses were evaluated using qualitative text analysis and commonalities are presented. In future research, the teachers' knowledge related to programming errors will be investigated on the basis of a survey developed from the answers of the presented study. CCS Concepts •Social and professional topics → Computing education;