Towards a Holistic Reservoir of Research-Based PCK Segments of K-12 Computer Science Teachers

Abstract

Computer science education (CSE) at the K-12 level is becoming increasingly more prevalent. Consequently, there is an urgent need for competent CS teachers; hence, also for effective training programs. The pedagogical content knowledge of CS teachers (CS-PCK) plays an important role in teachers' training. To effectively incorporate CS-PCK into teachers' training, a CS-PCK resource, which relies on the "wisdom of practice" of experienced teachers as well as the body of research on CS education would be of great value. Such a resource should consist of reliable, coherent, and self-contained CS-PCK segments, which can be used in relevant contexts with little processing and adaptation. Such a resource can also serve in-service teachers, developers of teaching materials, as well as others dealing with K-12 CS education. Constructing such a reservoir requires: 1) an effective procedure for obtaining reliable CS-PCK segments, and 2) a method for organizing CS-PCK segments that reflects their content and attributes. Herein we describe one part of a large research project on CS-PCK. In a previous publication, we reported on a method for extracting research-based CS-PCK segments from experienced teachers and established its effectiveness, thus satisfying the first requirement. The current paper concerns the second requirement. We will describe and demonstrate our innovative method for devising an incremental structure that can contain CS-PCK segments, obtained from either experienced teachers or from the CS education research literature.