Teacher Education and Computational Thinking: Measuring Pre-service Teacher Conceptions and Attitudes

In recent years, there has been a growing awareness of the need for computer science education opportunities and particularly for engaging students in computational thinking ideas and practices to help them understand how computing influences our world. At its core, computational thinking (CT) is seen as understanding how computational practices (such as, abstraction) and tools (such as modeling software) can be used to explore phenomena, solve problems, and influence our lives and society. The push for CT integration has called for preparing future educators to learn CT practices and tools through stand-alone courses and within the context of disciplinary pedagogy/methods courses. However, there are few instruments that measure pre-service teachers' attitudes towards computational thinking and its role in formal schooling. In this study, we developed and validated an instrument to measure pre-service teachers' attitudes towards CT, its role in students' lives, and their own self-efficacy to incorporate CT into their teaching. We report results from a principal components factor analysis on survey responses from 260 pre-service teachers to identify patterns and reduce the number of dimensions of comparison in the analysis. We discuss how pre-service teacher conceptions have implications for preparing future teachers to integrate computational thinking into their instruction.