ERIC Number: EJ1195546
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2018
Pages: 16
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1648-5831
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To Assess or Not to Assess: Tensions Negotiated in Six Years of Teaching Teachers about Computational Thinking
Hickmott, Daniel; Prieto-Rodriguez, Elena
Informatics in Education, v17 n2 p229-244 2018
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".
Descriptors: Coding, Computation, Faculty Development, Constructivism (Learning), Programming, Pedagogical Content Knowledge, Instructional Design, Expertise, Novices, Learning Processes
Vilnius University Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. Akademjos str. 4, Vilnius LT 08663 Lithuania. Tel: +37-5-21-09300; Fax: +37-5-27-29209; e-mail: info@mii.vu.lt; Web site: https://www.mii.lt/informatics_in_education/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A