Seventeenth International Conference on e-Learning & Innovative Pedagogies

Abstract

This paper examines the experiences, shift in attitude, and changes in self- efficacy after a department-wide intervention that introduced Computational Thinking concepts to both pre-service teachers and teacher education faculty. Our teacher education department (TED) is in a large urban community college and offers programs in early childhood, childhood, bilingual, and secondary education. TED students often enter the field with math and STEM anxiety which they then transmit to their own students upon becoming teachers, perpetuating the stigma around women and STEM, (Yadav and Mayfield, 2014). Therefore TED faculty sought to increase student confidence and self efficacy about CT concepts. Our interventions consisted of embedding low- stakes activities that scaffolded students’ understanding of CT concepts and data literacy throughout our course sequence. These activities helped students understand course concepts in child development, educational foundations and curriculum and instruction through new methods that made use of technology and data analysis. Preliminary results show that students increased self-efficacy for working with technology and that explicit connections between new concepts must be clearly connected to students’ prior knowledge to be fully integrated into their understandings. Additional analysis is forthcoming.