Board 313: Implementing Computational Thinking Strategies across the Middle/High Science Curriculum
Thomas R. Tretter, Olfa Nasraoui, Kyle Spurlock, Breanna Graven · 2024
This NSF Research Experience for Teachers (RET) "Research Experience for Teachers in Big Data and Data Science" (award number: 1801513) engaged four middle/high school science teachers in summer 2022 with research related to big data and data science, with follow-up school year implementation of related curricula.These teachers developed curricula related to their summer research experience in big data and data science that spanned a range of student ages and topics: middle school science, 9 th grade biology, 9 th grade health, and 11 th grade chemistry.Despite the wide range of student ages, curricular content, and instructional goals, all teachers found rich and varied curriculum applications related to data science and AI that fit within their existing curriculum constraints.In particular, teachers found that the Next Generation Science Standards [1] practice of "computational thinking" was the best lens for developing their aligned big data instruction.After exploring a taxonomy of computational thinking in mathematics and science [2], the teachers collectively eventually settled on a core set of four computational thinking skills [3] most likely to be productive for their teaching focus; algorithmic thinking, decomposition, abstraction, and pattern recognition.This paper reports on the variety of connections teachers developed with the practice of computational thinking, from data clustering as an active practice for simulating early generation of the periodic table in a chemistry class, to sampling/resampling populations in outdoor aquatic environments, to programming in middle school science, to adapting explainable AI for analyzing studentgenerated data in a health education class.Teacher reports of their own learning about research in data science, and how they were able to adapt that learning for the benefit of their middle/high school students, will capture the flexibility and value that this experience provided.