The surge of interest in K-12 computer science (CS) over the past decade has led to a deep need for a corresponding expansion of trained teachers. The primary focus of most K-12 CS teacher professional development has been for current in-service teachers who have little background in CS. To raise the importance of CS within Colleges of Education, we believe that new pathways and experiences are needed for pre-service Education majors to learn more about authentic CS topics and pedagogy. This experience report summarizes our efforts over the past two years to prepare Secondary Math Education (SEMA) majors to teachmore »
Preparing Pre-Service Teacher Candidates for the Praxis Exam: An Innovative Model of Blended Support
The expansion of K-12 computer science (CS) has driven a dramatic need for educators who are trained in CS content and pedagogy [1]. This poster describes our effort to train teacher candidates (i.e., pre-service teachers who are students seeking degrees within a College of Education), who are specializing in secondary mathematics education, to be future CS educators. We specifically describe our collaboration to provide a blended preparatory six-week training for the ETS CS Praxis exam (5652), assisting our pre-service students in satisfying the CS certification requirements in our state before they graduate and begin their professional teaching career. Given the unique challenges of pre-service CS teacher preparation [2], blended models, which combine both in-person and online instruction, are an effective approach to building a pre-service program. Within our pre-service CS program, students first complete a two-course pathway that prepares them in AP CSP content and pedagogy experiences, including observations in local AP CSP classrooms [3]. After completing the two courses, our students participate in the blended version of the WeTeach_CS Praxis preparation course to achieve certification. The in-person support provided by the blended model contributed significantly to certification success in this project. With a cut-score of 149 for the Praxis more »
- Award ID(s):
- 1738849
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10213108
- Journal Name:
- ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGSCE)
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 1298 to 1298
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
To meet the rising demand for computer science (CS) courses, K-12 educators need to be prepared to teach introductory concepts and skills in courses such as Computer Science Principles (CSP), which takes a breadth-first approach to CS and includes topics beyond programming such as data, impacts of computing, and networks. Educators are now also being asked to teach more advanced concepts in courses such as the College Board's Advanced Placement Computer Science A (CSA) course, which focuses on advanced programming using Java and includes topics such as objects, inheritance, arrays, and recursion. Traditional CSA curricula have not used content ormore »
-
CSAwesome is a new approved curriculum and professional development (PD) provider for the Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science (CS) A high school course. AP courses are taken by secondary (typically ages 14-19) students for college placement and/or credit. CSAwesome's free curriculum and teacher resources were developed in 2019 by adapting the CSA Java Review ebook on the open-source Runestone platform. The goals of CSAwesome are to broaden participation in the AP CSA course and to support new-to-CS students and teachers as they transition from the AP Computer Science Principles (CSP) course to the AP CSA course by using inclusive teachingmore »
-
In 2020, over 116,000 students took the Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles (AP CSP) Exam. Although Black female students have participated in AP CSP at higher rates than for the AP CSA course, their representation is still disproportionately lower than the school population of Black females. In this Experience Report, we present the early results of an NSF-sponsored effort that provides an AP CSP preparatory experience and CS career awareness to Black female students from rural, urban, and suburban communities in the state of Alabama. At the project’s core is a peer-learning community (PLC) facilitated by Black female teachers withmore »
-
As K-12 engineering education becomes more ubiquitous in the U.S, increased attention has been paid to preparing the heterogeneous group of in-service teachers who have taken on the challenge of teaching engineering. Standards have emerged for professional development along with research on teacher learning in engineering that call for teachers to facilitate and support engineering learning environments. Given that many teachers may not have experienced engineering practice calls have been made to engage teaches K-12 teachers in the “doing” of engineering as part of their preparation. However, there is a need for research studying more specific nature of the “doing”more »