A Qualitative Case Study: Pre-service Teachers as Novice Programmers

Year 2024, Volume: 12 Issue: 23, 292 - 318, 21.03.2024

Burcu Şener , Duygu Umutlu

https://doi.org/10.18009/jcer.1435182

Abstract

To meet the needs of 21st-century learners in today’s classrooms, it is needed that teachers be familiar with programming and computational thinking. Particularly, subject-area pre-service teachers should be exposed to programming instruction in their teacher education programs. This case study including three participants aims to explore the process of pre-service teachers’ learning of programming while completing CT-oriented tasks through observations and interviews in a 14-week educational technology course at a public university in Turkey. The findings demonstrate that pre-service teachers, being novice programmers, prefer contextualized, structured and visually well-designed programming tasks. They use various strategies to face challenges, and the effort they put into dealing with these challenges enables them to produce higher-quality programs. Accordingly, implications for further research are also discussed in this study.

Keywords

Computer science education, programming skills, teacher education, computational thinking

Ethical Statement

Name of the board that carries out ethical assessment: Boğaziçi University Social and Humanities Scientific Research and Publication Ethics Board The date and number of the ethical assessment decision: 24.01.2023-109746

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