How Teacher Educators Adapt Debugging Instruction for Novice Teachers in K-12 Professional Development Practices

2026-02-13

Computing education faces a unique challenge when teaching debugging skills to teachers who do not have a formal computer science background but who will need to learn programming to teach CS courses. While most debugging research about post-secondary learners focuses on preparing students for the technology industry, teacher professional development (PD) programs often serve a different population: teachers who are simultaneously learning computing knowledge and the pedagogical skills to teach it effectively. Through semi-structured interviews with seven facilitators of computing PD programs, this study explores how experienced PD facilitators approach the concept of debugging and instruct teachers in the process of debugging. We use reflexive thematic analysis to show how teacher PD differs from debugging recommendations in post-secondary CS: Rather than focusing on understanding the root causes of errors, facilitators scaffold the teachers' process of identifying and locating bugs to aid teachers in more quickly producing working programs, which they see as important for supporting teachers' confidence. This practical approach acknowledges the time constraints of PD workshops. Finding and understanding bugs is the most difficult part of the debugging process and is something post-secondary students struggle with even after completing one or two semesters of CS courses. These insights challenge assumptions about debugging pedagogy and highlight the need to carefully consider when new CS teachers should learn error analysis skills.

Teaching Computing to K-12 Emergent Bilinguals: Identified Challenges and Opportunities

2025-02-12 · 2 citations

Emergent bilingual (EB) students are a growing demographic within the United States, with an increasing number enrolling in K-12 computing courses. Since programming languages are primarily grounded in English, K-12 computing teachers must balance and tailor their instruction to meet the needs of these students. Teachers reported a lack of sufficient computing education resources to guide their instruction for teaching computing to EB students. Through a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with eight K-12 computing teachers who have EB students in their classrooms, we identified some of the challenges they face and the strategies they use to support them. Our analysis revealed three challenges: (1) students experience cognitive overload from translating between English and their native language, (2) terminology has subtle differences across disciplines (e.g., 'variable' in Math vs. Science), and (3) educators' low computing self-efficacy. Teachers counter these challenges with two implemented strategies: (1) providing multiple ways for EB students to engage with content to prevent them from becoming overwhelmed, and (2) offering multiple modalities to help translate computing concepts. This study contributes to the ongoing discussion on inclusive computing education by offering insights into educators' needs and potential solutions for supporting EB students' learning in computing.

Validation of the Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing Index: Do Computing Ethics Courses Make a Difference?

2025-07-31 · 1 citations

Computing ethics education aims to develop students' critical reflection and agency. We need validated ways to measure whether our efforts succeed. Through two survey administrations (N=474, N=464) with computing students and professionals, we provide evidence for the validity of the Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing Index. Our psychometric analyses demonstrate distinct dimensions of ethical development and show strong reliability and construct validity. Participants who completed computing ethics courses showed higher scores in some dimensions of ethical reflection and agency, but they also exhibited stronger techno-solutionist beliefs, highlighting a challenge in current pedagogy. This validated instrument enables systematic measurement of how computing students develop critical consciousness, allowing educators to better understand how to prepare computing professionals to tackle ethical challenges in their work.

The Development and Validation of the Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing Scale

2025-02-18

As discussions of computing's impact on society increase in public discourse, so does recognition for computing students to address the ethical and sociotechnical implications of their work. While efforts to integrate issues of ethics and social justice into computing curricula are nascent, we lack a standardized measure to monitor our progress towards these goals. In this poster, we report on the development and validation of the Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing Index, a novel instrument designed to assess undergraduate computing students' attitudes towards practicing critically conscious computing. The resulting index is a theoretically grounded, expert-reviewed tool with evidence for reliability and validity to support research and practice in computing ethics education. This enables researchers and educators to gain insights into students' perspectives, inform the design of targeted ethics interventions, and monitor the effectiveness of computing ethics education initiatives.

Computing for Community-Based Economies: A Sociotechnical Ecosystem for Democratic, Egalitarian and Sustainable Futures

ArXiv.org · 2025-04-08

Automation and industrial mass production, particularly in sectors with low wages, have harmful consequences that contribute to widening wealth disparities, excessive pollution, and worsened working conditions. Coupled with a mass consumption society, there is a risk of detrimental social outcomes and threats to democracy, such as misinformation and political polarization. But AI, robotics and other emerging technologies could also provide a transition to community-based economies, in which more democratic, egalitarian, and sustainable value circulations can be established. Based on both a review of case studies, and our own experiments in Detroit, we derive three core principles for the use of computing in community-based economies. The prefigurative principle requires that the development process itself incorporates equity goals, rather than viewing equity as something to be achieved in the future. The generative principle requires the prevention of value extraction, and its replacement by circulations in which value is returned back to the aspects of labor, nature, and society by which it is generated. And third, the solidarity principle requires that deployments at all scales and across all domains support both individual freedoms and opportunities for mutual aid. Thus we propose the use of computational technologies to develop a specifically generative form of community-based economy: one that is egalitarian regarding race, class and gender; sustainable both environmentally and socially; and democratic in the deep sense of putting people in control of their own lives and livelihoods.

Development of the Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing Index

2025-04-24 · 4 citations

As computing's societal impact grows, so does the need for computing students to recognize and address the ethical and sociotechnical implications of their work. While there are efforts to integrate ethics into computing curricula, we lack a standardized tool to measure those efforts, specifically, students' attitudes towards ethical reflection and their ability to effect change. This paper introduces the novel framework of Critically Conscious Computing and reports on the development and content validation of the Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing Index, a novel instrument designed to assess undergraduate computing students' attitudes towards practicing critically conscious computing. The resulting index is a theoretically grounded, expert-reviewed tool to support research and practice in computing ethics education. This enables researchers and educators to gain insights into students' perspectives, inform the design of targeted ethics interventions, and measure the effectiveness of computing ethics education initiatives.

Understanding Online Conversations Through Fractal Dimension: A Case Study Linking Semantic and Structural Analysis of Reddit posts on AI

Research Square · 2025-12-01

The Teacher's Dilemma: Balancing Trade-Offs in Programming Education for Emergent Bilingual Students

ArXiv.org · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

K-12 computing teachers must navigate complex trade-offs when selecting programming languages and instructional materials for classrooms with emergent bilingual students. While they aim to foster an inclusive learning environment by addressing language barriers that impact student engagement, they must also align with K-12 computer science curricular guidelines and prepare students for industry-standard programming tools. Because programming languages predominantly use English keywords and most instructional materials are written in English, these linguistic barriers introduce cognitive load and accessibility challenges. This paper examines teachers’ decisions in balancing these competing priorities, highlighting the tensions between accessibility, curriculum alignment, and workforce preparation. The findings shed light on how our teacher participants negotiate these trade-offs and what factors influence their selection of programming tools to best support EB students while meeting broader educational and professional goals.

Computing for community-based economies: A sociotechnical ecosystem for democratic, egalitarian, and sustainable futures

The Information Society · 2025-09-23

Designing Courses for Liberal Arts and Sciences Students Contextualized around Creative Expression and Social Justice

2025-02-12 · 1 citations

The goal of teaching everyone computing (explicitly including programming) predates the definition of the computer science (CS) major and even the prospect of a software development career. At the University of Michigan, we are creating courses for non-CS majors which are grounded in the computational practices of liberal arts and sciences faculty. These courses have no connection to the CS major curriculum or software development jobs. We focus here on two of the themes that those faculty valued (Computing for Expression and Computing for Justice) and the introductory courses that we designed around each theme. The courses emphasize gaining broad perspectives of computing, which serve the study of multiple disciplines. Student activities include readings, writing essays, classroom discussion, and open-ended programming homework assignments. This experience report describes our design process, the Creative Expression and Social Justice courses, and an initial evaluation of our design. Most of the programming assignments were written in the block-based programming language Snap!, with some in-class exercises using teaspoon languages. Several units ended with an ebook assignment to connect the Snap! programming to equivalent programs in Python, Processing, and SQL. Interview and survey findings suggest that students found this sequence and the courses useful, despite not counting toward a CS major or focusing on early software development skills. Students described usefulness in terms of developing general computing knowledge, preparation for a range of future careers, and introducing them to other course choices.