“If we want all kids to have opportunities to develop computational literacy — not just for jobs, but to understand how technologies function and shape our world, we need to start at the elementary level,” says Lappan-Phillips Professor of Computing Education Aman Yadav. “We need to provide computing learning opportunities for all students to help them succeed. Starting it at high school is too late.”
That’s why Yadav and other scholars from Michigan State University’s College of Education and Digital Promise secured a $2 million National Science Foundation grant in 2023 to give elementary educators the knowledge and skills to introduce computational thinking into the classroom.*
The project is more than halfway through its four-year span and recently expanded to include more in-service teachers across Michigan and Maryland to test and refine a computational thinking (CT) professional development model. Project collaborators include the Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD), where all the Michigan-based elementary teachers serve, and Digital Promise, a global non-profit working to expand opportunity for learners.
Teachers are testing a professional development program that includes video cases, summer workshops and monthly hands-on virtual learning opportunities led by Yadav, Associate Dean and Professor Emily Bouck and Professor Christina Schwarz in Michigan and Digital Promise leaders in Maryland.
Teachers have access to more than 50 videos of CT-integrated classroom instruction that showcase how teachers bring computing tools and practices to support subject-area learning. The videos were curated by capturing teachers from year one of the research grant, and some from previous research studies led by Yadav, such as the CT4EDU project launched in 2017. Findings from another NSF-funded, high school-based computing research project, also led by Yadav and based in DPSCD, informed this project.
“Research practice partnerships are essential because, ultimately, we want to do research with educators and students and not on educators and students,” said Bouck, associate dean for research in the College of Education. “Educational research has the power to positively impact education, schools, teachers and students, but it can be stronger when we are actively involving schools, districts or educators within the research.”
Overall, the project aims to develop and test a professional development approach anchored by videos and examine whether the videos themselves influence teachers’ knowledge and practice. The scholars will also investigate how students react: Do students’ computing identities change as a result of teachers’ incorporating CT into their classrooms?
The results may be nuanced — and that’s the point of the study, says Yadav, who is currently also serving as the interim director for the MSU CREATE for STEM Institute.
The teachers in the study include math, science, English language arts and social studies teachers with varying depths of CT knowledge and different perspectives on how to use CT in the classroom. Some, Yadav explained, embed CT practices like decomposition and debugging through computational tools into their classroom experiences. Others, he noted, introduce CT as vocabulary to explicitly engage their students in metacognition (i.e., thinking about their thinking) during problem-solving.
“We are figuring out how this Professional Learning can work for diverse teachers,” said Schwarz, associate chair of graduate education in the Department of Teacher Education. “CT integration is so valuable because it lets teachers focus on thinking strategies in and across their curriculum – and children get the chance to learn about and use approaches that can serve them throughout their lives.”
*MSU's collaborative research grant is $1.3M; Digital Promise has a grant for nearly $700,000.