Umar Shehzad

As science classrooms increasingly adopt computational tools to support inquiry-based learning, teachers must develop new instructional strategies to help students navigate the technical challenges that invariably arise, particularly debugging programmable sensors. This paper presents four case studies of secondary science teachers as they developed their “debugging pedagogies”—a repertoire of strategies to support students as they debugged a programmable sensor technology—through participation in two year-long professional learning cycles. Using the lens of the Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth, we analyze shifts across personal, practical, consequential, and external domains of teacher learning. Data sources include videos of teachers’ workshops activities and classroom enactments, interviews, and surveys. Analyses examine how teachers’ debugging pedagogies evolved through cycles of collaborative learning, reflection, and classroom enactments. While all teachers demonstrated increased confidence and responsiveness in supporting students’ debugging efforts, contextual factors, such as curriculum constraints and class size, shaped how their beliefs about how much to let students struggle during debugging translated into classroom practice. This work contributes to the field of science education by extending a model for designing professional learning to support both technical skill development and pedagogical growth in computationally rich classrooms.

In the United States, school curricula are often created and taught with distinct boundaries between disciplines. This division between curricular areas may serve as a hindrance to students’ long-term learning and their ability to generalize. In contrast, cross-curricular pedagogy provides a way for students to think beyond the classroom walls and make important connections across disciplines. The purpose of this paper is a theoretical reflection on our use of Expansive Framing in our design of lessons across learning environments within the school. We provide a narrative account of our early work in using this theoretical framework to co-plan and enact interdisciplinary mathematics and computer science (CS) tasks with a team of elementary school educators and school district personnel. The unit focuses on the concepts of exponents in mathematics and repeat loops as a control structure in computer science. Using a narrative approach, we describe what occurred during the collaborative planning of lessons and subsequent enactments in two fifth-grade classrooms and one computer lab and provide a practitioner‑oriented account of our experience.

Despite proliferated efforts to integrate computer science in elementary education, there is a dearth of studies that synthesize the current state of CS education research in formal educational contexts, specifically in upper elementary classrooms. Further, while numerous studies have investigated approaches and strategies that broaden participation in computing, the majority of them focus on secondary and post-secondary settings. The present study uses a systematic literature review process to review research conducted with students in formal classroom settings in grades 4, 5, and 6 and published since 2013. We review the research through two questions: What are barriers to broadening participation in CS in upper elementary (grades 4-6)? What instructional approaches and strategies help broaden participation in CS in upper elementary (grades 4-6)? A systematic search of the literature highlighted approaches used for broadening participation, including using various teaching media, designing scaffolds in instruction, and integrating into other subject areas. We conclude by identifying gaps in the research and identifying areas for further research.

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Measures typically used in computing education research at the elementary-school level that are aimed at measuring student learning outcomes are not capable of identifying instructional practices that contribute to improvements in learning. On the other hand, practical measures that help practitioners prioritize efforts aimed at improvement in instructional practices are limited in their capability to predict student learning outcomes. Thus, in this research, a combination of these practical and summative measures will be used to study complex interplays between students’ perceptions, motivations, and final learning outcomes. For analysis, latent growth curve modeling will be used on student experience exit ticket data to measure the change in students’ perceptions of the instructional intervention over lessons. Using the structural equation modeling approach, the latent growth model shall also incorporate a predictive relationship between the student experience exit ticket responses to the changes in the outcome measures from the pre and post surveys. Preliminary work on the working theory has been done that explains a theoretical relationship between practical measures and outcome measures, explaining how outcomes will be produced and how practical measures can help predict certain outcomes.