Abstract
There is limited research on teaching and learning of programming in primary school and even less about aspects concerning teaching programming from teachers’ viewpoint. In this study, we explore how Finnish 1-6 primary school teachers (N=91), teaching at schools with Swedish as the language of instruction, relate to programming and teaching of programming, one year after the introduction of the new national curriculum that included programming. The teachers’ relation to programming is studied by analyzing their view on programming, perceived preparedness to teach programming and their attitudes towards teaching programming. The main results of the present study are that the responding teachers approach programming in school with mixed emotions, but the majority claim to have sufficient preparedness to teach programming, and many of them have a positive attitude towards the subject. The findings indicate that the most important factor for high perceived preparedness and positive attitude is sufficient domain knowledge. The teachers’ views on programming are very diverse, ranging from focusing only on the connection to elementary step-by-step thinking to more sophisticated reasoning connecting to central aspects of computational thinking and other educational outcomes. The findings suggest that there is a need for educational efforts to make the connection between mathematical content and programming more visible for primary school teachers.
Highlights
Digital technology affects our daily lives, and programming and coding are at the very heart of this technology
The results suggest that the teachers, on average, feel that there is a relationship between the two subjects and that mathematics teachers are interested in working with programming but that they do not feel well prepared for taking on that task
We studied 91 Finnish primary school teachers’ relation to programming and to teaching programming by analyzing their views on the subject, perceived preparedness to teach the subject and their attitudes towards teaching the subject
Summary
Digital technology affects our daily lives, and programming and coding are at the very heart of this technology. There has been an increasing emphasis on integrating computer science into the school curriculum from lower grades in several countries (e.g. Schulte, Hornung, Sentence, Dagiene, Jevsikova, Thota, et al, 2012; Brown, Sentence, Crick & Humphreys, 2014; Duncan & Bell, 2015). This trend is to some extent driven by economic and technological demands for a future workforce (Chen, Shen, Barth-Cohen, Jiang, Huang, & Eltoukhy, 2017), but it has been stressed that computational thinking and code literacy are important skills for full participation in modern society (Dufva & Dufva, 2016). Authors point out that computer science education in early grades influences students’ persistence in the domain and their future career choices (Margolis, Estrella, Goode, Holme, & Nao, 2010; Yardi & Bruckman, 2007)
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More From: LUMAT: International Journal on Math, Science and Technology Education
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