Achieving CSforAll: Preparing Special Education Pre-service Teachers to Bring Computing to Students with Disabilities
Aman Kumar Yadav, Maya Israel, Emily C. Bouck, Alexis Cobo, John Samuels · Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education · 2022
While computational thinking has gained popularity in K-12 schools to increase access to computing tools and practices, there is still limited understanding on how to broaden participation of students with disabilities in computational thinking (CT). One approach to increasing access to computing to students with disabilities is to educate future special education teachers to bring CT into their instruction. This study examined the influence of integrating CT into assistive technology course for special education pre-service teachers. Our results suggest that integrating CT into special educa- tion teacher preparation coursework can have a positive impact on how pre-service teachers see the value of bringing computational practices to students with disabilities.