Primary School Teachers' Conceptions of Computational Thinking

Computational thinking (CT) is increasingly becoming a part of the K-12 educational landscape. While high schools with computer science teachers or technology coaches on staff are well positioned to help teachers integrate computational thinking into instruction, early childhood through middle schools (grades p-8) are often less well equipped. Further, the concept of CT is often poorly defined, especially as it relates to younger learners. Despite these challenges, teachers are being asked to integrate CT into other content lessons. To understand if and how this is happening, we conducted a statewide survey of primary (early childhood through middle school) Maryland teachers. The survey asked the teachers about their conceptualization of CT, CT resources they rely on, and their comfort levels to provide effective CT instruction for their students. The results of our survey demonstrate that teachers hold diverse views of the concept of CT and use a varied set of instructional resources in their classrooms. The contribution of this work is in helping advance our understanding of the current state of CT in primary classrooms.