1:45 of the video

Hi DeLene, It is really a matter of comfort level. While it appears that teachers are very comfortable with providing the scaffolding that children need to leverage their mathematical knowledge, teachers appear less comfortable in knowing the right kinds of scaffolding to support the exploration of a CT-focused way of solving a problem. Children also appeared to be very comfortable with the math knowledge required across the set of digital apps and hands-on activities we prototyped. Likewise, teachers appeared very confident in their strategies to support the math components of the activities.

Thanks for your question and your interest in our project, Marisa

Thank you for that informative response.  It's very compelling to think how the approach can change a way of thinking.  Thanks!

Thanks, Stacey. Here are some recommendations that came from our research. Best, Marisa

Providing a general framework for how classroom activities are explored in a CT-way can provide opportunities for teachers to develop a schema for supporting children during these types of activities. Specifically:

• Provide examples of types of questions, prompts, and feedback that teachers should use to support children as they struggle, which is typical and inherent within the activities. These supports can have different aims depending on children’s needs and the prompts can be for different types or parts of activities.
• Similarly, the teacher should differentiate instruction depending on the focal CT skill of the activity. For sequencing, greater support might be needed in helping children to generate the steps of a process, while debugging may require teachers to help children identify the problem. Activity supports should draw teachers’ attention to the more challenging part of each focal skill.
• Emphasize ways to help teachers recognize children’s strengths in order to bootstrap learning. For example, finding errors in simple patterns and fixing them is a skill the children seem comfortable with during the CT activities. Leveraging children’s competence with this skill is a way to provide a bridge between obvious error-detecting and supporting children in the development of skills for finding less obvious errors that are in need of correction.
• Help teachers to individualize their support and feedback towards children at different levels. Providing questions or prompts for beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners of CT skills might provide teachers with needed guidance for this. Advanced learners could use generalized feedback, perhaps akin to app feedback that simply alerts a player to a problem, with beginner and intermediate learners needing more specific or targeted feedback.
• Provide teachers with examples of where and how these CT skills can be used outside of written hands-on activities, highlighting ways that teachers can help children understand the utility of the skills and support transferring them to other activities. Particularly with respect to sequencing, this connection seems important so that children can understand the consequences of not using sequencing (both the describing of individual steps and the ordering of them).

Hi Michael,

The games we developed were designed to be used offline so we did not produce a data log that would inform iterative design development. However, for this project, we had multiple opportunities to collect observational data from children as they played the games. This data is what informed the iterative development. Thank you for your question! Marisa

Hi DeLene,

I think one of our greatest challenges was the iterative development of our hands-on, CT learning tasks to assess young children’s CT knowledge. It was very challenging to create tasks that are as authentic as possible, asking children to solve relatable, real-world problems, provide for open-ended responses to showcase children’s abilities to use CT skills; and allow the assessor to document not only children’s ability to solve a problem, but also the process with which they approach problem-solving. It is also challenging to develop tasks that can be reliably administered to children with wide-ranging abilities. We hope to find funding in the future to further explore how to address challenges. Cheers, Marisa

Hi Traci! Thanks for your question. We've thought so much about the lessons we'd want to apply to our future work.  Happy to share my own reflections on the research with you.  Here's what I'd say are the biggest pieces of advice I'd give to other researchers based on this experience.

1. It’s important to build buy-in and demand for CT in the early childhood community, both for the fidelity of implementation on individual research projects and for the long-term vitality of doing this work in early childhood.  Without a solid foundation, it is difficult to parse apart the reasons for any observed challenges during the formative research.  
2. Observations were helpful during our last round of research to get a broad strokes feel for how things were going in the classroom. However, having videos as a data source was essential in helping us see the promising practices that were generating the richest experiences for kids.  Observers can only collect so much data on the fly so the videos were essential to help us go deeper in our understanding.
3. Our community still hasn’t cracked the nut on best practices for assessing CT in young kids.  It’s challenging to assess cognitive/internal processes in children that are still developing verbal ability and higher-order thinking skills.  While learning tasks can be very informative in certain regards, they’re labor intensive and difficult to scale up to larger sample sizes. It’s important for researchers to think carefully about the objectives of their study. If you’re attempting to assess impact or gather evidence of learning, think about whether any existing, common measures could help support understanding in what kids can do.

 And side note: I just watched your Showcase video on your Data Clubs project.  How cool!  I can see how what we're doing with younger kids would help support middle school students' engagement with analyzing data later in life.  I love how our projects all fit together in helping students put CT skills to work.  Also - I was so struck by the relevance of the investigation you had students do for the world we're living in right now. So many adults could benefit from the skills that students are gathering from Data Clubs!! 

Yes! Kids love to explore, tinker, figure out--and when they are given those opportunities starting at the earliest stages of learning I think they really get hooked on learning, they develop confidence in their reasoning, and they come to value the sort of systematic and careful thinking that is at the heart of all STEM disciplines. Your three pieces of advice make a lot of sense to me. We've got to make a case for why this work is important. Finding ways to measure or document the types of rich learning we want to see within a diverse and developing population is a huge challenge. And I really found your comment about capturing the learning on video compelling.  Being able to bring those videos to project meetings and spend time reflecting on on both what students say and do, and returning to those images over time, is an invaluable piece of our own learning as we do this work. 

Thank you, that is helpful! I do a lot of thinking around inquiry, inquiry-based learning, etc. and supporting that in preschoolers as well as even younger kids. I'm interested to see some similarities here. Have you all thought much about how this might translate for infants and toddlers? I think they are doing some of this kind of exploration already!

Hi Marley,

Yes, they are certainly doing this kind of exploration. We have not thought about how it might translate for infants and toddlers, primarily because WGBH mostly focuses its work on older children. Food for thought for a future direction. Thanks! Marisa

I love it!  Slowing things down, allowing time to struggle, wonder, think... just a few of your points but all allow for development of a deeper understanding.  I would also say time to talk would be another one that is implied in your comments. Aother level of processing and learning is acheived when preschoolers can verbalize what they are thinking, discuss ideas with peer, and be guided by strategic questions from the teacher. 

Absolutely! Supporting teachers in asking open-ended questions to identify and discuss a problem and having them help children verbalize their thinking, recap the steps of a sequence after they do them correctly to reinforce the sequence, and reflect on solutions are all crucial in order to promote children's computational thinking. Best, Marisa

Paul, I think it is terrific that you want to bring CT to your teachers to build early skills.  I also feel the earlier the better!  I taught preschool and kindergarten for years.  Now I'd like to build this into my professional development courses.  So...I am also interested in knowing the answer to your question... 

 if we started to scale this out somewhat more broadly, what are things you might add into the project and/or do differently to further support teachers?