Introduction—What Is this Guide About? - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 10

Chapter 9—Types of Questions in Computer Science Education. This chapter
explores and discusses the variety of question types that a computer science teacher
can use in different teaching situations and processes: in the classroom, in the com-
puter lab, as homework, and in tests. The integration of different types of ques-
tions has several pedagogical advantages. We mention four: first, different types of
questions enable to illuminate different aspects of the learned content; second, dif-
ferent types of questions require the students to use different cognitive skills; third,
different types of questions enable the teacher to vary his or her teaching tools;
and fourth, the integration of different types of questions throughout the teaching
process keeps the students' interest, attention, and curiosity. It is important to ad-
dress this theme is the MTCS course to increase the prospective computer science
teachers' awareness to the fact that the use of different types of problems in their
teaching processes can enrich their pupils' variety of thinking processes and expand
the spectrum of their cognitive skills. Special attention is given to problem-solving
questions, their formatting (for example, keywords used), and the needed skills to
solve them.
Chapter 10—Assessment. Assessment is one of the most common tasks teach-
ers perform from the early stages of their professional development. This chapter
highlights the uniqueness of assessing learners' products and learning processes
in the case of computer science education. The main message conveyed in this
chapter is that assessment is not a target by itself, but rather, a pedagogical means
by which, learners get feedback related to their own understanding of the learned
topic, and the teacher learns on the understanding of the current knowledge of his
or her pupils, and can accordingly improve his or her teaching tools and methods
to help them overcome their current obstacles. The topics presented in this chapter
are test construction and evaluation, project evaluation, and the use of a portfolio in
computer science education.
Chapter 11—Teaching Planning. Planning a teaching sequence is one of the ba-
sic stages of any teaching process. This chapter illustrates a top-down approach for
teaching planning. It starts with a broad perspective that relates to the planning of
an entire curriculum (e.g., an introductory computer science course), continues with
the planning of one topic from the curriculum (e.g., teaching one-dimension array),
and finally addresses the planning of a specific lesson (e.g., the first lesson about
arrays). In all these stages, the multifaceted considerations that a teacher should
be aware of while planning the teaching process are addressed. In addition, an ap-
proach to teaching planning is presented, according to which a complicated concept
understanding is constructed in a spiral gradient manner.
Chapter 12—Integrated View at the MTCS Course Organization: The Case of
Recursion. This chapter reviews the guide's chapters systematically through the
lens of recursion—one of the central computer science concepts. The main mes-
sage of the chapter is to demonstrate that the entire course can be organized around
one computer science core idea. The ideas presented in this chapter can be used by
instructors of the MTCS course as well as by other computer science educators. We
mention, though, that recursion is only one candidate for such course organization
and other computer science concepts, such as abstraction, control structures, and
abstract data types, can be used for this purpose.