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The role of teachers in implementing curriculum changes

Published: 06 March 2013 Publication History

Abstract

In 2011 New Zealand introduced computer science into high schools after a long period when computing was mainly focussed on training students to be users. The transition was rapid, and teachers had little time to upskill to prepare for the new topics, and yet there was widespread voluntary adoption of the new standards. The role of teachers and the national teachers' organisation in making the change has been pivotal, and this paper reviews the changes from the teachers' perspective. This story is intended to inform those planning similar changes in other countries, and provide a context for the next steps in NZ. The discussion centres around a survey of 91~teachers, which reveals strong intrinsic motivation from teachers to make the changes, a mixture of prior knowledge and skills that teachers shared with each other through peer support and online communication, a low level of confidence as teachers of computer science, and a need for further professional development.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '13: Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
March 2013
818 pages
ISBN:9781450318686
DOI:10.1145/2445196
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 March 2013

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  1. curriculum implementation
  2. teacher professional development

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SIGCSE '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 111 of 293 submissions, 38%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,787 of 5,146 submissions, 35%

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Future Scenarios for High School Digital Technology in New ZealandProceedings of the 25th Australasian Computing Education Conference10.1145/3576123.3576126(21-30)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2023
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  • (2023)Towards Automated Assessment of High School Programming2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10343243(1-9)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Everyone is an Expert: Rhizomatic Learning in Professional Learning ContextsRhizome Metaphor10.1007/978-981-19-9056-4_3(25-52)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2023
  • (2023)Computing Education Research in AustralasiaPast, Present and Future of Computing Education Research10.1007/978-3-031-25336-2_17(373-394)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2023
  • (2022)A Brief Discussion on Incentives and Barriers to Computational Thinking EducationResearch Anthology on Computational Thinking, Programming, and Robotics in the Classroom10.4018/978-1-6684-2411-7.ch012(253-269)Online publication date: 2022
  • (2022)Teachers’ Views on the Implementation of a New High School Computing CurriculumProceedings of the 22nd Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3564721.3564732(1-10)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Barriers to New Zealand High School CS Education - Learners' PerspectivesProceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 110.1145/3478431.3499344(927-933)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2022
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