Maria Knobelsdorf, University of Dortmund, Germany - Didaktik der ...

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Data in this study are drawn from 11 NSW (state of Australia) schools between 2005 and 2007. It includes 722 surveys. The male students present higher levels of home-based and school-related abilities than the females. Only for male students there is a direct connection between home-related confidence in one’s ability and plans to take CIT subjects (see [5], 193). Downes and Looker also find out that there are three key factors which influence plans to take CIT subjects in senior secondary years: gender, amount of use at school and the value students place on CIT subjects (see [5], 194). The latter two factors are inter-related either directly or indirectly to home use and home- and school-related confidence in one’s ability. Consequently the authors conclude that “any school-based interventions that focus on increasing use of IT at school, and increasing the ’value’ of CIT subjects, need to also address increasing home use and self-perceived skill levels in tasks associated with both home and school use” ([5], 194f). 2.4 Results from ChiK The project “Chemie im Kontext (short: ChiK)” is introduced representatively for the context-based projects biology, chemistry and physics. Contexts are chosen as starting points and structuring elements of teaching units. These contexts are either based on the environment of the learner or are relevant through social references or later vocational perspectives. The chemistry lessons are planned as practical training and a means to advance the learners’ development of competence (see [11] and [13]). Moreover, the symbiotic implementation strategy is employed (see [10]). So-called ”learning communities”, consisting of 8 - 12 teachers from different schools in cooperation with scientists and representatives of the education administration develop, test and improve teaching units on the basis of a context-based approach to teaching and learning chemistry (see [7], 54- 64). The learning communities are named “sets”. Sets 2 are follow-up projects of sets 1 with low organisational changes. Two fundamental questions of this research are ([7], 65): • Do the students perceive changes in the teaching approach? Do the students of the sets 1- and sets 2teachers differ from each other in their perception of a change in teaching approaches? In order to see the teaching practice from the students’ point of view, they were asked to describe their chemistry lessons using four characteristic features of teaching: systematic teaching of the subject, practical knowledge, crosscurricular competences and self-controlled learning. • Do motivation and interest develop equally in students of sets 1 and sets 2? The data collection for the sets 1 took place at the beginning of the school year 2002/2003 (t0) and at the end of the school years 2002/2003 (t1) and 2003/2004 (t2). The survey of the sets 2 was carried out at the beginning of the school year 2003/2004 and at the end of the school years 2003/2004 and 2004/2005. The students had to indicate their level of agreement or disagreement for a series of statements. The four-level answer scale ranged from “1” meaning “strongly disagree” to “4” meaning “strongly agree” (see [7], 66-69). The following results were obtained: The students did perceive changes in their chemistry teaching approach (see table 1). The increased perception of prac- 36 tical knowledge and self-controlled learning and at the same time the reduction of the dominance of systematic learning leads to the conclusion that students do notice the essential criteria of the ChiK concept. The motivation of the ChiK students in the chemistry lessons shows a declining development in the course of the second project year (see table 2). In another comparative study it could be shown that the motivation of the ChiKstudents declined significantly less than in classes which received traditional chemistry teaching (see [7], 75). A positive result is that in the two years under observation there was no decline of interest (see table 2), whereas other scientific studies reviewing subjects like physics or biology show a continuous decline in interest from grade 5 to grade 9 (see [22], 367). The development concerning sustainable interest is not significant. Fussangel et al. describe the results in ([7], 72-76). 2.5 Summary of important results The studies discussed show that vocational orientation must be seen as an interplay of a lot of factors also influenced by gender. Among other things interests and the selfconcept play a crucial role. Todt, who analyzes the importance of school for the development of childrens’ interests, also maintains that interests tend to be an important condition for the choice of profession or of academic study (see [22], 373). Structures of interest are also closely connected to children’s general estimations and orientations. Specific and general interests are integrated into the individual selfconcept, especially towards the end of adolescence, i.e. the end of school education. There are a lot of indications, however, that interests can develop during the whole span of life, provided they do not contradict the self-image and the activities involved can be mastered and lead to some satisfaction (see [22], 375). Certain conditions of teaching practices noticed by the students can influence the students’ characteristics ”self-determined motivation” and ”interest”. These characteristics are interrelated with each other. On the basis of our research project InTech the teaching characteristics student- and context-orientation as well as the student characteristics interest, self-concept of ability in Informatics and vocational orientation will be explored. In the following chapters we give an overview of the history and the organisation of our experiment, the evaluating research and finally the first results. 3. THE INTECH EXPERIMENT 3.1 Description of part I For three school years, from 2005 to 2008, six secondary schools in Lower Saxony, Germany, tested ways of teaching Informatics in grades 7 to 9. Lessons in participating classes were held according to “Time Schedule I”, which allocated three hours per week in grade 7 and four hours in grades 8 and 9. Different organisational concepts and teaching units were developed, e.g. some schools cooperated with the subjects of arts and economy and others cooperated with astronomy or physics. All participating teachers met at regular intervals to exchange experiences, at least 4 times a year. Due to the fact that all schools decided to use robots in their classes and most schools in Germany cannot afford to buy 8 or more sets of robots at the same time, the project was sponsored by the “Stiftung NiedersachsenMetall”.
mean at t0 mean at t2 mean at t0 mean at t2 (sets 1, N = 549) (sets 1) (sets 2, N = 237) (sets 2) systematic subject teaching of the 3.28 3.16 3.09 2.90 practical knowledge 2.37 2.45 2.33 2.50 cross-curricular competences 2.42 2.20 2.33 2.50 self-controlled learning 2.29 2.63 2.10 2.48 Table 1: Description of teaching approach from a student-oriented point of view (see [7], 73) mean at t0 mean at t2 mean at t0 mean at t2 (sets 1, N = 59) (sets 1) (sets 2, N = 238) (sets 2) motivation 3.08 2.81 3.00 2.74 sustainable interest 1.98 2.04 2.09 2.08 Table 2: Perception of motivation and interest from a student-oriented point of view (see [7], 74) Although there was no scientific evaluation during this first phase some results can yet be reported by Modrow and Reineke (see [14]): • At all participating schools the offer was so much in demand that selection procedures had to be introduced in the following years. • Boys and girls were attracted to the offer in equal numbers. • Motivation exceeded that of “normal” compulsory lessons. • Teachers were positively surprised at the students’ performances. • At some schools, groups could be motivated to participate in national and even international competitions for robotics. Two students from Intech even became world champions. • All schools developed teaching units involving robots (mostly using LEGO-Mindstorms). Boys and girls were equally enthusiastic about constructing and programming these. • All lessons were action/activity-oriented. • Teamwork was encouraged by the lessons’ project-oriented layout. • The participating teachers found it easy to introduce interdisciplinary questions and problems in Informatics classes. 3.2 InTech - part II In order to use and expand the experiences attained and to enable others to benefit from them as well, technicaloriented Informatics classes will be introduced or continued to be developed at 23 additional schools for three more years, beginning in grade 7. 13 of these schools are coordinated by us from the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg and financed by “Arbeitgeberverband Nordmetall” and the “Stiftung des Verbands der Metall- und Elektroindustrie”. The other 10 schools are once more supported by the “Stiftung NiedersachsenMetall” and coordinated by colleagues from the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. 37 Schools wanting to participate must possess facilities that enable them to teach Informatics from the 7th grade onwards. A further requirement is the presence of two appropriately qualified teachers. The central concern of InTech in relation to the students is the following: Beginning with the 7th grade, the contextand student-oriented lessons in Informatics with technical aspect should encourage technical thinking and practice as well as introduce students to the functional principles and utilization of information and information systems. By doing so we want to support students in choosing a career in the Informatics business. In order to ensure sustainability by the distribution of the results, we pursue the following arrangements regarding the teachers: • to establish a network of Informatics teachers, • to develop, test and upgrade student- and contextoriented teaching material, • to make the teaching material available via the Internet in order to be used and developed further and • to distribute the teaching concepts by further professional training. Finally, one goal of this second phase is also to conduct new research and to develop and expand further education opportunities for teachers. 3.3 The concept of InTech The described goals will be realized by using a “symbiotic strategy of implementation” as explained by Frey et al. (see [6], 242-244) on the basis of the guideline“Technical thinking and action in meaningful contexts”, developed by our team. It contains the following strategy: Informatics teachers and researchers must establish a “working team” (so-called set of teachers) which gets together on a regular basis, participates in different training courses and discusses, develops and realizes technical-based teaching units co-operatively. The set of teachers consists of about 24 teachers from 13 schools who participate in the project InTech (see [3], 97). The involvement with technical-related contents and working methods from different fields leads to the development of project-oriented and activity-based lessons. Options for
Page 1 and 2: Fakultät für Mathematik, Informat
Page 3 and 4: Program Committee Michal Armoni Wei
Page 5 and 6: Challenge and Creativity: Students
Page 7 and 8: Challenges in Computer Science Educ
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Page 51 and 52: 8. REFERENCES [1] Bell, T. et al. 2
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Page 65 and 66: einterpreted, or excluded, for exam
Page 67 and 68: How Teachers in Different Education
Page 69 and 70: attended by about a 33-40 % of all
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Page 73 and 74: [23] Huynh, H. and Feldt, L. S. 197
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Page 77 and 78: other topic. The reasons given vari
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Page 85 and 86: However, even when such learning th
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Grand challenges for the UK: Upskil
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first two questions. We maintain th
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(Some) Grand Challenges of Computer
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ecoming more student-centered. Inde
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[13] OECD. (2006). Are students rea
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in the world, for example, as descr
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The aims of the case study were to
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Figure 8: Acquisition of programmin
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The focus group girls were more con
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tool for teachers and students in t
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eledSQL - A New Web-Based Learning
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create and manage teacher accounts.
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ABSTRACT Bringing Contexts into the
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3.1.1 Greenfoot as a framework for
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Real-world context Views of Computi
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Real-world context GP Context Artif
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i. e. theories, models, frameworks,
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1. Context-based education in compu
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Figure 1. Network traffic for authe
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A weak point of the Vigenère algor
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We have learnt that we can both loo
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Comparing CSTA K-12 Computer Scienc
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grade 4, 5, 6 or 8, depending on ch
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Table 1. Scoring Scale for the Impl
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the highest rate of implementation
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Information Theory on Czech Grammar
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of information in a message M, repr
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Data modeling and database systems
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the knowledge about ICT and CS (see
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The Mindstorm Effect: A Gender Anal
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Exploring the processing of formatt
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Teachersʼ Perceptions Of The Value
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Technocamps: Bringing Computer Scie
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Abenteuer Informatik - Hands-on exh
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Gaming and Mathematics: A Cross Cur
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Turi: Chatbot software for schools
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ABSTRACT Learning Fields in Vocatio
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ABSTRACT This study examines the po
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