Professional Development in Computational Thinking: A Systematic Literature Review

This paper presents a systematic literature review of professional development programs in Computational Thinking. Computational thinking (CT) has emerged as an essential set of skills that everyone should develop to participate in a global society. However, there were no pre-service or in-service teacher programs to integrate CT into the K-12 classrooms until very recently. Thus, it is important to identify how educators and researchers address the challenges to prepare the next generation of students and what gaps persist in the current literature. We review existing work in this field from two perspectives: First, we analyze the learning outcomes, assessment methods, pedagogical approaches, and pedagogical tools used in the Professional Development programs in CT. Second, we examine how these programs assess the teachers’ knowledge and skills as outcomes. We used the technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) framework to characterize existing literature and identify possible gaps in the preparation of pre-service and in-service teachers in CT. Our results suggest that: (1) existing evidence is limited to developed countries; (2) many studies are only focusing on teachers understanding the concepts but do not explore how the participants evaluate or create learning activities; (3) no studies look into classroom observations as part of the program, which limits our understanding to how these programs work; and (4) most programs use block-based programming languages as the tool to develop student computational thinking. While block-based programming languages are used for introductory training programs, students are often expected to transfer their learning to more professional programming languages.