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of specific computer science topics? What is an appropriate way to organize the
teaching sequence of a specific topic? What is the source for specific learners' dif-
ficulties? Which learning/teaching strategies are shown (by research findings) to
work better in a specific teaching situation? A significant layer—T—was added
to the PCK: TPCK, which means technological pedagogical-content knowledge.
TPCK is a framework to understand and describe the kinds of knowledge teach-
ers need for an effective pedagogical practice in a technology enhanced learning
environment. This relates to the uses of any environments and specifically with
respect to teaching computer science (e.g., Ben-Bassat Levy and Ben-Ari, 2007 ,
2008 ; Lee 2011 ; Ioannou and Angeli 2013 ; Mouza et al. 2014 ). In addition to
finding answers to these questions in the research literature on computer science
education, computer science teachers can find in these literature recommenda-
tions for diagnosis exercises, teaching methods, teaching tools, etc.
Adopting a researcher's point of view . Teachers' exposure to research in comput-
er science education expands their acquaintance with various research tools. This
acquaintance may, in turn, enrich their pedagogical toolbox and let them be more
attentive to specific characteristics of their pupils. Specifically, such knowledge
may enable them to be sensitive to their pupils' needs, conceptions, difficulties,
and cognitive skills, and accordingly, to enrich their pedagogical toolbox and
improve their pedagogical skills. Here are two examples for the implementa-
tion of these ideas: (1) Lapidot and Ragonis ( 2013 ) describe a project conducted
with leading high school computer science teachers to support their preparation
and submission process of a paper or a poster to an academic conference; (2)
Tashakkori et al. ( 2014 ) established a 3-year project to build research experience
for teachers. The objective was to provide in-service high school teachers and
community college faculty to work with faculty mentors and their graduate and
undergraduate assistants to conduct research in data analysis and mining, visual-
ization, and image processing. It can be seen that both projects were built based
on the belief that exposing teachers to the computer science education research
and actively writing a research paper has the potential to advance their teaching
skills in many ways.
4.2.3
Resources for Computer Science Education Research
Many resources exist for computer science education research. It is important to
expose the prospective computer science teachers to these resources, and maybe,
even further, to explore with them a potential contribution to one of these resources.
We list here several such resources:
• The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) digital library 1
• The Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) confer-
ence proceedings 2 . The papers are published also in the ACM digital library
1 See http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm
 
 
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