Assessing Disciplinary Teachers'Pedagogical and Content Knowledge in Computational Thinking

Promoting computational thinking (CT) integration in curricula requires well-prepared teachers with pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Existing research often uses pretest/posttest instruments or teacher reflections to assess outcomes of professional development programs (PDP). Still, this approach is limited and can be misaligned with other learning outcomes. This study characterizes teachers'PCK through a PDP, focusing on how they enact it in designing lesson plans (n = 21) in a professional development program for K- 12 teachers. We adapted the Use-Modify-Create progression commonly used to support student learning in computer programming, and used it for teachers to learn about designing CT learning activities. Participants submitted a lesson plan integrating CT into their courses. Our results suggest that while teachers'lesson plans included both CT and disciplinary outcomes, their assessment strategies were not always well aligned. Participants used various pedagogical approaches and tools to integrate CT into disciplinary classrooms. This paper contributes to the body of work in PDP for CT by proposing an approach to assess teacher PCK beyond pretest/posttest designs and highlighting areas requiring support when integrating CT into disciplinary courses.