To Assess or Not to Assess: Tensions Negotiated in Six Years of Teaching Teachers about Computational Thinking
Coding and computational thinking have recently become compulsory skills in many school systems globally. Teaching these new skills presents a challenge for many teachers. A notable example of professional development designed using Constructionist principles to address this challenge is ScratchEd....
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Vilnius University
2018-10-01
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| Series: | Informatics in Education |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://infedu.vu.lt/doi/10.15388/infedu.2018.12 |
| _version_ | 1798035574450290688 |
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| author | Daniel HICKMOTT Elena PRIETO-RODRIGUEZ |
| author_facet | Daniel HICKMOTT Elena PRIETO-RODRIGUEZ |
| author_sort | Daniel HICKMOTT |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Coding and computational thinking have recently become compulsory skills in many school systems globally. Teaching these new skills presents a challenge for many teachers. A notable example of professional development designed using Constructionist principles to address this challenge is ScratchEd. Upon reflecting on her experiences designing and running ScratchEd, Karen Brennan identified five tensions faced by professional development providers, and proposed that these tensions could be used for scrutinising and critiquing professional development. In this paper we analyse, through the lens of Brennan's tensions, the process we have followed to design, evaluate and improve professional development. We argue that while we have experienced the same tensions, the extent to which we assess learning is a new tension that extends those identified by Brennan. There are strong reasons to assess teachers' knowledge, however, quantitative measures of learning could be at odds with Constructionism: as Papert argued in Mindstorms, constructionist educators should study their learning environments as anthropologists. Consequently, we have called this new tension the tension between anthropology and assessment. |
| first_indexed | 2024-04-11T21:00:05Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-4636f3e468664c1685f989fbaf6de933 |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 1648-5831 2335-8971 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-04-11T21:00:05Z |
| publishDate | 2018-10-01 |
| publisher | Vilnius University |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Informatics in Education |
| spelling | doaj.art-4636f3e468664c1685f989fbaf6de9332022-12-22T04:03:32ZengVilnius UniversityInformatics in Education1648-58312335-89712018-10-0117222924410.15388/infedu.2018.12To Assess or Not to Assess: Tensions Negotiated in Six Years of Teaching Teachers about Computational ThinkingDaniel HICKMOTT0Elena PRIETO-RODRIGUEZ1School of Education, The University of Newcastle, AustraliaSchool of Education, The University of Newcastle, AustraliaCoding and computational thinking have recently become compulsory skills in many school systems globally. Teaching these new skills presents a challenge for many teachers. A notable example of professional development designed using Constructionist principles to address this challenge is ScratchEd. Upon reflecting on her experiences designing and running ScratchEd, Karen Brennan identified five tensions faced by professional development providers, and proposed that these tensions could be used for scrutinising and critiquing professional development. In this paper we analyse, through the lens of Brennan's tensions, the process we have followed to design, evaluate and improve professional development. We argue that while we have experienced the same tensions, the extent to which we assess learning is a new tension that extends those identified by Brennan. There are strong reasons to assess teachers' knowledge, however, quantitative measures of learning could be at odds with Constructionism: as Papert argued in Mindstorms, constructionist educators should study their learning environments as anthropologists. Consequently, we have called this new tension the tension between anthropology and assessment.https://infedu.vu.lt/doi/10.15388/infedu.2018.12teacher professional developmentconstructionismComputational Thinkingprogrammingpedagogical content knowledge |
| spellingShingle | Daniel HICKMOTT Elena PRIETO-RODRIGUEZ To Assess or Not to Assess: Tensions Negotiated in Six Years of Teaching Teachers about Computational Thinking Informatics in Education teacher professional development constructionism Computational Thinking programming pedagogical content knowledge |
| title | To Assess or Not to Assess: Tensions Negotiated in Six Years of Teaching Teachers about Computational Thinking |
| title_full | To Assess or Not to Assess: Tensions Negotiated in Six Years of Teaching Teachers about Computational Thinking |
| title_fullStr | To Assess or Not to Assess: Tensions Negotiated in Six Years of Teaching Teachers about Computational Thinking |
| title_full_unstemmed | To Assess or Not to Assess: Tensions Negotiated in Six Years of Teaching Teachers about Computational Thinking |
| title_short | To Assess or Not to Assess: Tensions Negotiated in Six Years of Teaching Teachers about Computational Thinking |
| title_sort | to assess or not to assess tensions negotiated in six years of teaching teachers about computational thinking |
| topic | teacher professional development constructionism Computational Thinking programming pedagogical content knowledge |
| url | https://infedu.vu.lt/doi/10.15388/infedu.2018.12 |
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