Abstract:

Investment in teacher professional development is an essential activity for enhancing the curriculum with 21st century skills. An ongoing process in Sweden is to introduce computer programming as a new tool to reinforce the learning and understanding of technology and mathematics in K-12 settings. Lessons learnt from the first batches of teacher training highlights the need of a modified course design that better suits the target group. Universities have a tradition of designing programming courses for Bachelor and Master programmes where students develop a proficiency for future work in the industry or as researchers in academia. K-12 teachers are in several ways a different target group with different needs, both for didactic design and for course content. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss a set of theoretical assumptions that could be useful for evaluation and redesign of teacher training courses on programming.

A narrative literature review was conducted to summarise a particular area of research that could meet the research aim. This type of review is useful to gather a volume of literature in a specific subject area and to synthesise it for future work. A narrative literature review is typically selective in the material it uses, in a strive to synthesise a purposeful body of literature that later can be further explored. Results from a thematic analysis have been combined to a set of theoretical assumptions that could be used for evaluation and redesign of teacher training courses on computer programming.

Findings contain a wide variety of interesting concepts that have been compiled into a set of theoretical assumptions. The most interesting found theories and concepts were Adult learning, Andragogy, The self-determination theory, Online Communities of practice, Blended communities of practice, Feed-forward assessment, Game-based learning, Pair programming, Mob programming, and Software visualisation. A set of theoretical assumptions that all will be discussed with K-12 teachers for a future course redesign and curriculum development.

Keywords:

Teacher training, Programming education, Adult learning, Blended communities of practice, Game-based learning, Software visualisation, Group programming.