Abstract:

Regardless of the fact that the demand for jobs in all fields of Computer science and jobs requiring the knowledge and skills associated with computers has constantly outpaced the growth in the supply all over the world, satisfactory solutions to the problem have not been found, resulting in a continuous gap between supply and demand. Besides that, most jobs require computer literacy and computer fluency. The only way to provide enough skilled workers is through education. Therefore, we can conclude that informatics education is fundamental to modern education. To be more precise, what we are interested in is the development of computational thinking which is a fundamental skill along with writing, reading and arithmetic.

Fundamental skills are to be mastered during K-12 education. Informatics as a formal school subject in K-12 education, is still insufficiently represented in Europe and the rest of the world. The question arises who will teach the students? If there is no formal Informatics education in the educational system, there is no need for formal informatics teacher education. If there are no formally educated informatics teachers, teachers with no adequate informatics education are frequently assigned to teach Informatics subjects. All mentioned results in the problems in implementation of the basic idea of elementary education that is educating students in fundamental skills needed for living in a real world.

In the Republic of Croatia computational thinking is a part of an informatics course, a compulsory course for students in 5th and 6th grade of elementary school (10-12 years old). In Croatia, the education of Informatics teachers started in the late 1980s. First, it was part of an education program for two school subjects mathematics and informatics. Back then the informatics part counted only several informatics courses. However, with the development of informatics the number of specialised courses increased, resulting in a University program for Informatics teachers educated for teaching only Informatics.

The question is: How to standardise the informatics teacher occupation?

In Croatia, the Ministry of Science, Education and Sport, national agencies and centres, and local authorities, are the main institutions responsible for primary and secondary school teacher education. The main framework for reforms in education is provided by Croatian Qualifications Framework (CROQF) that has been developed and implemented as the main reforming tool respectively at all education levels. The CROQF provides the framework for education reforms with a strong emphasis on improving overall quality of education and matching qualifications standards and education programmes with the labour market needs. In our case we have researched what competencies are needed to become an informatics teacher. The research based on analysis and evidence on competences required by employers and forecasted by researchers resulted in a development of informatics teacher occupation standard found in the CROQF register.

Keywords:

Informatics teacher, occupational standard, taxonomy, competencies.