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Title: Reimagining Professional Development for K-8 CS Teachers: Evaluating a Virtual, Diffuse Model
There is a need for more K-12 computer science (CS) teachers. The need to scale teacher professional development (PD) points the CS education community towards virtual learning, and prior work shows that in-person PD with a diffuse schedule is more successful than condensed schedules. There is currently little research about virtual K-12 CS PD with a diffuse schedule. The pandemic served as a forced opportunity to explore the design and implementation of a diffuse-scheduled virtual PD for two small, equally-sized cohorts of middle school (grades 5-8) teachers; one from a metropolitan school district and another from across the United States. Our findings reveal several important post-pandemic design implications for future CS PD programs. First, the teachers’ CS knowledge and attitudes significantly increased in both cohorts. Second, there were no significant differences in attitudes or achievement between the cohorts. Third, the teachers in the virtual PD showed as good changes or better in attitude than those in a prior in-person PD. Finally, both cohorts were largely positive about the change from a few intensive PD days to a few hours a week for several weeks, even as they joined from vacations.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1738758
NSF-PAR ID:
10382312
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
The 53Rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE ’21)
Volume:
1
Page Range / eLocation ID:
530 to 536
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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