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Ways of Planning Lessons on the Topic of Networks and
the Internet
ABSTRACT
Ana-Maria Mesaro¸s
University of Oldenburg
Computer Science Education
26111 Oldenburg, Germany
ana.maria.mesaros@uni-oldenburg.de
Changing conditions and different educational concepts are
wide-spread problems of Computer Science education. Due
to this fact suitable teacher training can only be developed
if the preconditions of CS teachers are being considered. In
order to find out about teachers’ subjective theories on planning
lessons we asked them how they would plan lessons on
the specific topic of networks and the Internet. In this paper
we show the research framework for examining this question
and describe the organization of our study and first results.
The different ways of planning lessons for this specific topic
we found and describe here differ enormously.
Keywords
subjective theories, educational reconstruction, planning lessons
1. INTRODUCTION
Without a basis of generally accepted standards and with
varying qualifications Computer Science (CS) teachers make
their own decisions on what topics to teach and how to teach
them. This leads to a situation in which the planning of
lessons on a specific topic differs greatly from teacher to
teacher. The reasons for this are different subjective theories
about CS and different ideas about teaching approaches.
For those who want to provide effective teacher training
like us those subjective theories are very important to know.
To gain this basic knowledge, we conducted a survey on the
question on how teachers would plan a lesson on the specific
topic of networks and the Internet.
Parts of this research have already been introduced in [9]
where we reported on a pre-test. We therefore confine ourselves
here to giving only a short introduction to the research
framework. The focus of this paper is on the different possibilities
to plan lessons on the topic of networks and the
Internet. Therefore, our next step is to describe this framework
shortly, the design of the interview and the sample. We
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75
Ira Diethelm
University of Oldenburg
Computer Science Education
26111 Oldenburg, Germany
ira.diethelm@uni-oldenburg.de
then present the results achieved so far: How the planning
of lessons defers in the reasons for teaching this topic, in
the contents of the topic, in the structuring the content, in
the learning objectives pursued with it and the used teaching
methods and teaching material. We also report on the
different ways of integrating students’ perspectives in the
planning of lessons. Finally we draw our conclusions and
give a preview of our future work.
2. EDUCATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION
FOR TEACHER EDUCATION
The research questions presented above are embedded in
the framework of Educational Reconstruction for Teacher
Education which shows the significance of teachers’ subjective
theories on the planning of their lessons.
This model is based on the model of Educational Reconstruction.
The main idea is that to plan lessons means to
structure a content considering the students’ perspectives
[6]. Therefore the scientific content has to be broken down
and rearranged, so that the students’ perspectives are taken
into account. This study is based on the adaptation of the
model of Educational Reconstruction for Teacher Education.
This adaptation, see fig. 2, contains some changes in
Figure 1: Educational Reconstruction for Teacher
Education [6]
comparison with the original one. The content for teacher
training is defined by the scientific view of a topic and by
the domain-specific educational concepts. As in the original
model of Educational Reconstruction the content has to