Module 8 of the UCL ECT programme requires participants such as myself to conduct a practitioner inquiry focusing on ECF standards 4, 5 and 6. Here I'll outline how I'm going to be carrying out my inquiry over term 4 which will in various ways touch on each of these standards.
I'll be focusing my inquiry on teaching an introductory Python programming unit to year 8 students (12 and 13 year old's). I currently teach a total of 4 year 8 classes and will be taking two different teaching approaches with different groups to test which helps students to gain the most secure understanding of introductory python programming concepts.
Motivation
In recent years a range of products like Turing Lab* have come onto the market promising to be able to help students to learn programming without the need for an expert teacher. This is a particularly attractive proposition to many UK schools currently struggling to recruit teachers generally let alone computer science teachers. But are students experiencing these products as their primary programming instruction being short changed compared with their peers in schools that timetable them with a qualified computer science teacher? Or is learning programming using these tools, many of which implement "gamification" in an attempt to hold learners attention for longer, actually more effective for the teaching of introductory programming?
The answers to these questions hold significance not just for how we deliver the national curriculum here at Wheatley Park, but also for computer science education at secondary level throughout the UK in a landscape in which we don't have enough computer science teachers and consequently schools are having to make decisions about the best use of time for those specialists they do have access to.
The teaching approaches
The students
The 4 year 8 classes I currently teach are 8a/Co1, 8a/Co2, 8b/Co1 and 8b/Co2. To ensure the inquiry is as fair as possible I'll be using each teaching approach with 1 class from each side of the year group. 8a/Co1 and 8b/Co1 will receive "teacher-led" lessons on introductory Python programming from me whilst 8a/Co2 and 8b/Co2 will be following the Turing Lab introductory Python curriculum.
This gives the two overall groups the following demographics:
"Teacher-led" group
- n = 62
- Male = 31
- Female = 31
Turing Lab group
- n = 58
- Male = 27
- Female = 30
- Non-binary = 1
which have some slight variation between them however it would be impossible to get them to completely match without creating custom groups specifically for this inquiry which I can't do. The slight variation in the demographics of the groups shouldn't be enough to significantly impact the results of the inquiry.