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1. A Case Study of Teacher Professional Growth Through Co-design and Implementation of Computationally Enriched Biology Units

   Peel, A. (July 2020, ICLS 2020)

   Gresalfi, M. and (Ed.)

   Teachers in K-12 science classrooms play a key role in helping their students engage in computational thinking (CT) activities that reflect authentic science practices. However, we know less about how to support teachers in integrating CT into their classrooms. This paper presents a case of one science teacher over three years as she participated in a Design Based Implementation Research project focused on integrating CT into science curriculum. We analyze her professional growth as a designer and instructor as she created and implemented three computationally-enriched science units with the support of our research team. Results suggest that she became more confident in her understanding of and ability, leading to greater integration of CT in the science units. Relationships with the research team and co-design experiences mediated this growth. Findings yield implications for how best to support teachers in collaborative curriculum design. 

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2. An Analysis of Middle Grade Teachers' Debugging Pedagogical Content Knowledge

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3502718.3524770  

   Tsan, Jennifer; Weintrop, David; Franklin, Diana (July 2022, The 27th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education)

   There is an increasing need for knowledgeable K-12 computer science (CS) teachers. It is necessary to inform teachers how to debug and help their students debug programs. Research has shown that debugging is difficult for novices because the process requires different skills from creating programs and instructing students how to debug can help them acquire these skills. To this end, we developed a CS professional development for middle grade teachers (grades 5th-8th/ages 10-13) that includes lessons on debugging. The teachers completed debugging activities that involved finding bugs in Scratch programs and explaining how they would help their students in debugging. We qualitatively analyzed their responses and found that teachers successfully identified the problem but they struggled to locate it in the code. In considering how they would help students who had such a bug, the teachers often focused on helping the student find a solution for the bug rather than on identifying the problem or its source. Finally, teachers’ ability to identify bugs and the pedagogical strategies to engage students in this process differed based on CS teaching experience and prior CS knowledge. This work contributes to our understanding of teachers’ debugging abilities and advances our knowledge on how to support teachers in teaching their students how to debug their programs. 

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3. Engaging Students in Sensemaking via the Science and Engineering Practices

   Ricketts, Amy; Rasmussen, Tiffany (August 2025, Science scope)

   We know that teachers want their students to have plentiful opportunities for scientific sensemaking. Based on our experience, we believe that other teachers will find the SEP Tools very useful for helping them work toward that goal. The SEP Tools are useful whether working solo or in collaboration with other teachers, but we do encourage you to engage in this work with other teachers whenever possible. We found that using the language from the tool in our collaborative conversations really helped us to clarify and align our thinking about what it looks like for middle school students to be fully engaging in the practices, as defined by the NGSS. If you are the sole science teacher in your school or district who wants to use the SEP Tools with a thinking partner, you might consider reaching out to other teachers via your local or state science teacher association, your county office of education, or a professor of science education at a nearby university. 

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4. Computational thinking in elementary classrooms: Using classroom dialogue to measure equitable participation

   Larimore, R. (May 2021, Proceedings of the Research in Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering (RESPECT))

   null (Ed.)

   The increased push for access to computer science (CS) at the K-12 level has been argued as a way to broaden participation in computing. At the elementary level, computational thinking (CT) has been used as a framework for bringing CS ideas into the classroom and educating teachers about how they can integrate CT into their daily instruction. A number of these projects have made equity a central goal of their work by working in schools with diverse racial, linguistic, and economic diversity. However, we know little about whether and how teachers equitably engage students in CT during their classroom instruction– particularly during science and math lessons. In this paper, we present an approach to analyzing classroom instructional videos using the EQUIP tool (https://www.equip.ninja/). The purpose of this tool is to examine the quantity and quality of students’ contributions during CT-integrated math and science lessons and how it differs based on demographic markers. We highlight this approach using classroom video observation from four teachers and discuss future work in this area. 

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5. Pair debugging of electronic textiles projects: Analyzing think-aloud protocols for high school students’ strategies and practices while problem solving.

   Jayathirtha, G.; Fields, D. A.; Kafai, Y. B. (January 2020, The Interdisciplinarity of the Learning Sciences, 14th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2020)

   Gresalfi, M.; Horn, I. (Ed.)

   Much attention has focused on student learning while making physical computational artifacts such as robots or electronic textiles, but little is known about how students engage with the hardware and software debugging issues that often arise. In order to better understand students’ debugging strategies and practices, we conducted and video-recorded eight think- aloud sessions (~45 minutes each) of high school student pairs debugging electronic textiles projects with researcher-designed programming and circuitry/crafting bugs. We analyzed each video to understand pairs’ debugging strategies and practices in navigating the multi- representational problem space. Our findings reveal the importance of employing system-level strategies while debugging physical computing systems, and of coordinating between various components of physical computing systems, for instance between the physical artifact, representations on paper, and the onscreen programming environment. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research and designing instruction and tools for learning with and debugging physical computing systems. 

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