Math+CS: Comparing Teaching Candidates in a Methods Course and Pre-Service Teachers in a Math and Technology Course

While governments, teacher educators, and teachers recognize the importance of introducing computer science (CS) in K-12, there is limited understanding about when the teacher preparation should start and how it needs to be done. Furthermore, with the rapid expansion of digital technology in our society and the way it affects our lives, new educational frameworks for better teacher preparation have been developed, such as TPACK and CTIntegration, that situate new technologies and their role in education to meet the new societal demands. There is a larger body of research in Mathematics on how on how to prepare teachers to teach than in CS. This study explores how graduate teaching candidates and undergraduate pre-service teachers engage with Math+CS modules differently. We were interested in the similarities and differences in the way senior-level pre-service teachers in a mathematics and technology class and graduate-level teacher candidates in a methods class interact with Math+CS integrated modules. Working with the concepts of variable, input, and output, we investigated which knowledge domains were leveraged among groups in different classes, what connections they make between the concepts in math and CS, and their uncertainty. The results indicated that there was a difference in the way the teaching candidates in their methods class approached the computational modules than the pre-service teachers. The pre-service teachers focused more on developing their CS content knowledge, and the teacher candidates were interested in making connections between their knowledge domains, reflecting on how their students would think about the concepts in math, expressing more concerns, and asking more questions to develop their TPACK.