Mid Sweden University

Investment in teacher professional development is an essential activity for enhancing the curriculum with 21st century skills. An ongoing process in Sweden is to introduce computer programming as a new tool to reinforce the learning and understanding of technology and mathematics in K-12 settings. Lessons learnt from the first batches of teacher training highlights the need of a modified course design that better suits the target group. Universities have a tradition of designing programming courses for Bachelor and Master programmes where students develop a proficiency for future work in the industry or as researchers in academia. K-12 teachers are in several ways a different target group with different needs, both for didactic design and for course content. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss a set of theoretical assumptions that could be useful for evaluation and redesign of teacher training courses on programming.  

A narrative literature review was conducted to summarise a particular area of research that could meet the research aim.  This type of review is useful to gather a volume of literature in a specific subject area and to synthesise it for future work. A narrative literature review is typically selective in the material it uses, in a strive to synthesise a purposeful body of literature that later can be further explored. Results from a thematic analysis have been combined to a set of theoretical assumptions that could be used for evaluation and redesign of teacher training courses on computer programming.   

Findings contain a wide variety of interesting concepts that have been compiled into a set of theoretical assumptions. The most interesting found theories and concepts were Adult learning, Andragogy, The Self-determination theory, Blended communities of practice, Feedforward assessment, Game-based learning, Pair programming, Mob programming, and Software visualisation. A set of theoretical assumptions that all will be discussed with K-12 teachers for a future course redesign and curriculum development.