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Middle School STEM Teachers’ Understandings of Computational Thinking: A Case Study of Brazil and the USA

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Conference

2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Tampa, Florida

Publication Date

June 15, 2019

Start Date

June 15, 2019

End Date

June 19, 2019

Conference Session

Technical Session

Tagged Division

International

Page Count

16

DOI

10.18260/1-2--33107

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/33107

Download Count

643

Paper Authors

biography

Cristina Diordieva Texas Tech University

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Cristina Diordieva is the Project Coordinator for the World MOON Project, and at the same time, she is a doctoral candidate majoring in Educational and Instructional Technology and minoring in Bilingual Education programs in the College of Education at Texas Tech University. She earned a BA majoring in French and minoring in Linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas Tech University. She is highly interested conducting research within multidisciplinary studies including computational & engineering thinking, language massive open online course (L-MOOC), educational technology, online learning, and designing online STEM courses. In addition, in 2017, she became the first and only individual to obtain the Diplôme de Français Professionnel from the Chamber of Commerce of Paris Professional French at Texas Tech University. Moreover, she was awarded as the Paul Whitfield Horn Fellow and Helen DeVitt Jones Fellow at Texas Tech University. She is interested expanding her research interests and teaching practices in a higher education research institution and can be reached at cristina.diordieva@ttu.edu.

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biography

Ibrahim H. Yeter Purdue University-Main Campus, West Lafayette (College of Engineering) Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-0175-2306

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Ibrahim H. Yeter is a Postdoctoral Researcher in his second year in the INSPIRE-Research Institute for Pre-College Engineering in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. He completed his PhD degree majoring in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis in Engineering Education and minoring in Educational Psychology as well as an MS degree in Petroleum Engineering at Texas Tech University. He also obtained an MEd degree from Clemson University. His research interests focus on teacher education and students learning issues within Engineering Education/Pedagogy and Computational Thinking/Pedagogy field of studies. He received national and international recognitions including an Early Career Researcher award from European Science Education Research Association (ESERA) and a Jhumki Basu Scholar award from National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST). In addition, he is one of two scholarship recipients awarded by NARST to attend the ESERA summer research program in České Budějovice, Czech Republic in 2016. He can be reached at iyeter@purdue.edu.

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biography

Walter S. Smith Texas Tech University

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Helen DeVitt Jones Professor of Education

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Abstract

In recent years, computational thinking has received increasing amounts of attention, with numerous K-12 institutions looking to incorporate it into existing STEM curriculums. This movement to improve computational thinking literacy, supported by numerous professional organizations (e.g., American Society for Engineering Education [ASEE], National Research Council [NRC], National Academy of Engineering [NAE]) and Next Generation Science Standard (NGSS Lead States, 2013), attempts to improve students’ problem-solving skills and strategies. Efforts to improve computational thinking have been aimed at both teachers and students. However, few studies exist to investigate how teachers implement the teaching of CT practices in courses with a component that involves collaboration between students in multiple countries. Therefore, the focus of the study is to explore middle school STEM teachers’ understandings of computational thinking practices, if any, within an integrated STEM education teaching approach. This study is an international study, as the teachers are from two countries, Brazil and the United States. For this study, an extensive semi-structured interview protocol is used to gather data from a sample of four middle school STEM teachers. All of the teachers are communicated with in English to collect the data. A case study method is implemented to collect and analyze interview data to identify similarities across cases. Member checking is used to confirm accuracy in the results. Findings from this study offer insights for researchers, middle school teachers, curriculum developers and professional development providers.

Diordieva, C., & Yeter, I. H., & Smith, W. S. (2019, June), Middle School STEM Teachers’ Understandings of Computational Thinking: A Case Study of Brazil and the USA Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--33107

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