Supporting Preservice Teachers’ Computational Thinking Practices in an Engineering Content Course
Open Access
- Author:
- McLaughlin, Gozde
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 14, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Scott Mcdonald, Program Head/Chair
Scott Mcdonald, Major Field Member
ChanMin Kim, Outside Unit & Field Member
Carla Zembal-Saul, Major Field Member
Amy Farris, Chair & Dissertation Advisor - Keywords:
- computational thinking
preservice teachers
science and engineering practices
science education
engineering education - Abstract:
- Everyday scientific and engineering practices heavily rely on computational representation of information, computational methods for data collection, analysis, and visualization. Since one of the biggest goals of science education reform is making science learning more similar to the work of scientists, it’s not surprising that “using mathematics and computational thinking” is one of eight science and engineering practices in the Next Generation Science Standards (NRC, 2012). Despite the increasing emphasis on integrating these practices, further exploration is needed to understand how to support teachers in this endeavor. This challenge is further compounded by teachers’ lack of prior experience with these practices in their own education. My research comprises three studies focused on supporting preservice teachers' computational thinking practices in science and engineering education. The study takes place in a semester-long science and engineering course, where preservice teachers regularly engage in computational thinking practices to investigate scientific phenomena or solve engineering design problems. Through the analysis of student artifacts and my detailed field notes, these three studies collectively contribute to supporting preservice teachers’ computational thinking practices. The findings emphasize the importance of fostering learners' sustained engagement in computational thinking practices that is reflexive (Harel & Papert, 1991) with their broader scientific inquiry. Additionally, it is essential to provide preservice teachers with ongoing opportunities to evaluate computational tools, as this contributes to deepening their epistemology of computational tools and practices by placing the focus on computational tools as designed artifacts, with inherent design decisions. Moreover, supporting preservice teachers' computational thinking practices requires a focus on learners’ dialogic work (Sengupta et al., 2021), wherein the design of computational artifacts is a dialogue with potential users of the artifact. Lastly, I draw on the complex systems (Jacobson & Wilensky, 2006) literature to propose an analytical framework to understand and support preservice teachers' design of computational artifacts.