An official website of the United States government
The need to expand computer science learning for all students has led to an increase in professional development (PD) opportunities for teachers. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, necessitated changes in well-established PD programs and a shift to virtual delivery. In this work, we describe our transition to a virtual PD institute, including the topics and design principles guiding the institute. We also examine how participation in the virtual PD institute infuenced teacher outcomes. Data were collected from two cohorts of teachers. Data sources included surveys (N=30), lesson plans (N=22), and interviews (N=17) from a purposeful sample of participants. Findings gleaned from quantitative and qualitative analysis suggest an increase in teachers’ knowledge and self-efcacy while highlighting the afordances of virtual PD most valued by teachers. Findings have implications for research and practice.
more »
« less
Investigating relationships of sentiments, emotions, and performance in professional development K-12 CS teachers
Background and Context: Professional development (PD) programs for K-12 computer science teachers use surveys to measure teachers’ knowledge and attitudes while recognizing daily sentiment and emotion changes can be crucial for providing timely teacher support. Objective: We investigate approaches to compute sentiment and emotion scores automatically and identify associations between the scores and teachers’ performance. Method: We compute the scores from teachers’ assignments using a machine-assisted tool and measure score changes with standard deviation and linear regression slopes. Further, we compare the scores to teachers’ performance and post-PD qualitative survey results. Findings: We find significant associations between teachers’ sentiment and emotion scores and their performance across demographics. Additionally, we find significant associations that are not captured by post-PD qualitative surveys. Implications: The sentiment and emotion scores can viably reflect teachers’ performance and enrich our understanding of teachers’ learning behaviors. Further, the sentiment and emotion scores can complement conventional surveys with additional insights related to teachers’ learning performance.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1837476
- PAR ID:
- 10545539
- Publisher / Repository:
- Taylor & Francis
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Computer Science Education
- ISSN:
- 0899-3408
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1-32
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
As part of a larger effort to understand the impact of professional development (PD) on teachers’ thinking and practices, this research explores changes in epistemic orientation (and associated practices) of two cohorts of secondary science teachers as they were involved in a longitudinal PD. To measure epistemic orientation, Epistemic Orientation toward Teaching Science surveys were administered at three-time points and teachers’ classrooms were observed. Findings suggest that change in epistemic orientation occurred for teachers who engaged in two years of PD, but that one year was not sufficient to engender such changes in epistemic orientation or instructional practice. These findings speak to the need for continuous, highquality, longitudinal PD.more » « less
-
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
-
Few studies of computational thinking (CT) integration in elementary curricula have yet focused on supporting early elementary educators with implementing and assessing their young students’ application of these practices to content area work. This paper summarizes a collaborative research project that engaged researchers, K-second grade teachers, and professional development (PD) providers in implementing a hybrid PD model to answer the following research questions: (1) What kind of PD and guidance do teachers need to identify and support emergent computational thinking development in young students’ language and work process? (2) What kind of PD and guidance do teachers need to identify emergent computational thinking development in young students’ work products? This project employed a mixed-methods research design that included pre- and post-surveys and interviews with teachers to measure and understand how growth in teachers’ confidence, knowledge, and self-efficacy with CT prepared them to identify and support these concepts with young learners. Additionally, analysis was able to identify the key formative assessment strategies these teachers employed to generate insight into students’ understanding and application of CT during problem-solving.more » « less
-
Instructional shifts required by equitable, reform‐based science instruction are challenging, especially in the elementary context. Such shifts require professional development (PD) that supports teacher internalization of new pedagogical strategies as well as changes in beliefs about how students learn. Because of this complexity, many PD programs struggle to foster lasting pedagogical shifts, necessitating further investigation into why some teachers successfully embrace reform practices while others do not. This qualitative study uses a nonlinear, iterative model of teacher learning (Interconnected Model of Professional Growth; Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002) alongside professional noticing to help understand why elementary teachers in science PD differentially make sense of and internalize new pedagogies. Findings indicate that teachers most likely to adopt reform‐based instructional practices from the PD were those who clearly connected student learning to their instructional moves. In addition, teachers who more actively attended to student sensemaking and productive struggle took up pedagogies from the PD more substantively than did colleagues who attended solely to student engagement and affect. Finally, teachers who attended to and valued novel ideas from students’ lived experiences were more likely to change their beliefs about students’ capacity to learn science, and thus more likely to see the value of instructional practices from the PD. In sum, structuring PD to build on these specific teacher noticing skills can encourage more teachers to move away from traditional, teacher‐directed instructional practice, and more fully support reform‐based instructional practices.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/08993408.2023.2298162
