High School STEM Teachers Understanding of Computational Thinking
Keywords:
Computational Thinking, STEM, abstraction, decomposition, algorithm design, pattern recognitionAbstract
In this first paper of a two-part series, this portion of the study examined high school STEM teachers understanding of computational thinking (CT) core concepts of a) decomposition, b) pattern recognition, c) abstraction, and d) algorithm design. A qualitative instrumental case study research design was employed as a lens to explore teachers’ understanding of CT. Five STEM high school teachers with specific knowledge and experience about our topic of interest were recruited through purposeful sampling. Data was collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews and analyzed through thematic analysis. Findings in the study revealed teachers’ understandings of CT were informed by their perspectives that anchored around engineering and societal underpinnings. Findings of these study provide insights to the varying definitions of computational thinking in scholarly literature. Based on these findings of CT core concepts, the second portion of this study will describe how these teachers integrated these core elements into their instructional practices.
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