Comparing K-5 teachers' reported use of design in teaching programming and planning in teaching writing

Abstract

K-5 teachers teach a range of subjects & develop generic teaching skills; when starting to teach computing, particularly programming, practitioners may not realise that they can draw on these other skills to support their teaching. In a small study of K-5 teachers, potential synergies were suggested between using planning in the the teaching of writing and design in the teaching of programming. In this paper, we explore these synergies by surveying a wider group of teachers (n=207) on their uses of planning and design. Teachers reported the usefulness of planning for writing and design for programming as equally important. However, there were significant differences in their uses. The majority saw planning as essential in writing & put this into practice in their teaching. For example, they demonstrated the creation of plans, expected students to annotate plans, required students to refer to plans when writing and used plans to differentiate. By contrast, these uses were implemented less frequently in programming tasks. We also report on differences in the confidence of male & female respondents, & between generalists (who teach programming & writing) & specialists (who do not teach writing). For example, females were more confident to teach writing than programming, with males vice versa. Having revealed opportunities for reuse of successful techniques used in teaching writing for the teaching of programming we recommend further work is needed to explore this transfer of pedagogical knowledge.

Difficulties with design: The challenges of teaching design in K-5 programming

“…Why is hard to fathom. Confidence in teaching programming is the only other difference we have related to gender, with males more confident to teach programming than females (Waite et al, 2018b) . However, there was no statistically significant difference for the selection of terms for any image by confidence.…”

“…Added to this, few K-5 teachers in England are thought to have been taught programming or design themselves, therefore further research, support and training have been called for (The Royal Society, 2017a). Recent research suggests teachers in England think design is useful but avoid doing it (Waite et al, 2018b) . However, there has been no research to understand the reasons behind this.…”

“…We developed the survey presented here to discover whether our findings on the confusion over the term 'algorithm' was seen in a wider population of teachers; explicitly including an activity selecting terms to describe code snippets and design artefacts. We reported preliminary results in Waite et al (2018b) This covered teachers' responses to questions on quantitative data related to confidence to teach writing and programming; usefulness and use of planning and design; and 5 core specific uses of planning and design. As previously reported, from the current survey, 82% of teachers reported design in programming projects as being either 'Essential' or 'Very Useful' and yet just half of these teachers, 44%, converted this view of importance into action of using design in classroom 'Always' or 'Usually'.…”

“…However, there is little research on the pedagogy of teaching algorithms and design in programming to this age group, or even on understanding the problems to be overcome (Waite, 2017). Recent research indicates that teachers think design is 'Essential' or 'Very Useful' but are not converting this view of importance into action of using it in class (Waite et al, 2018b) .…”

Teaching computer programming with PRIMM: a sociocultural perspective

“…Armoni (2013) renamed the object level as algorithm; using this Statter and Armoni (2016) evidenced impact on programming progress from high school students who understood the level at which they were working at. Another study using this framework reported teachers of K-6 students supporting learners to move between the LOA levels in teaching programming in similar ways to how they supported young students in learning how to write in English lessons (Waite, Curzon, Marsh, and Sentance, 2018). Related to this work is the Abstraction Transition Taxonomy (ATT) (Cutts, Esper, Fecho, Foster, and Simon, 2012).…”