Jennifer AlbertThe Citadel · School of Education
Jennifer Albert
PhD in Science Education
About
46
Publications
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396
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Additional affiliations
August 2015 - present
September 2013 - August 2015
Publications
Publications (46)
This chapter documents findings from the Making CT (Computational Thinking) project, a collaborative effort between project team members and elementary teachers that aims to reimagine interdisciplinary, computational thinking-infused making lessons for a virtual format. Virtual making CT lessons were grounded in four design principles: standards-ba...
The COVID-19 pandemic led to an urgent need for professional development (PD) experiences to support teacher learning across hybrid and digital contexts. This study investigates teachers' experiences in a Virtual Pivot, a PD workshop designed to support computational thinking integration into disciplinary teaching. Participants were 151 middle and...
In this article, we leverage ideas from the theory of coevolutionary computation to analyze interactions of students with problems. We introduce the idea of informatively easy or hard concepts. Our approach is different from more traditional analyses of problem difficulty such as item analysis in the sense that we consider Pareto dominance relation...
Infusing Computing is a three-year professional development project that supports middle and high school teachers in integrating computational thinking into their disciplinary teaching. During the first two years of the project, 266 teachers (99 individuals, 167 members of school-based teacher teams) attended week-long summer workshops and particip...
This paper explores the integration of interdisciplinary, standards-based making in elementary classrooms through an investigation of teachers’ navigation of contradictions between traditional academic practices and the playful, imaginative, and collaborative design thinking that characterizes making. Empirical findings are reported from a three-ye...
In this paper, we explore how standards-based Making activities offer opportunities for teachers to address interdisciplinary concepts and encourage students to tinker, collaborate, create, and design. This qualitative study draws on results from a two-year, NSF-funded research project that involved the integration of standards-based Mobile Maker K...
This study draws on data collected from a larger research project, Infusing Computing, which aims to design and implement models for supporting middle and high school teachers as they infuse computing into their disciplinary teaching. Specifically, this paper examines data from 24 teachers' implementation of CT-infused lessons during the 2018-2019...
In summer 2018, we conducted two week-long professional development workshops for 116 middle and high school teachers interested in infusing computational thinking (CT) into their classrooms. Teachers learned to program in Snap!, connect CT to their disciplines, and create infused CT learning segments for their classes. This paper investigates the...
The automated design of a set of practice problems that co-adapts to a population of learners is a challenging problem. Fortunately, coevolutionary computation offers a rich framework to study interactions between two co-adapting populations of teachers and learners. This framework is also relevant in scenarios in which a population of students sol...
One way to increase access to education on computing is to integrate computational thinking (CT) into K12 disciplinary courses. However, this challenges teachers to both learn CT and decide how to best integrate CT into their classes. In this position paper, we present PRADA, an acronym for Pattern Recognition, Abstraction, Decomposition, and Algor...
The purpose of this paper is to describe findings from a study in which we investigated a gradual increase of responsibility model to scaffold a 1st and a 3rd grade teacher as they integrated interdisciplinary, standards-based Mobile Maker Kits into their classrooms over the course of an academic year. Qualitative discourse and multimodal analysis...
The purpose of this session is to describe our implementation of a professional development model designed to support middle and secondary content area teachers in integrating computational thinking into their classrooms. Drawing on findings from our mixed methods analysis of interviews, surveys, and teacher-created products, we argue that the prof...
We propose to further extend preliminary investigations of the nature of the problem of evolving practice problems for learners. Using a refinement of a previous simple model of interaction between learners and practice problems, we examine some of its properties and experimentally highlight the role played by the number of values each gene may tak...
This paper identifies design guidelines for the application of evolutionary techniques to the task of generating practice problems for learners in an Intelligent Tutoring System. To this end, we designed experiments that progressively incorporated an increasing number of the characteristics we expect to find in our target application. These feature...
We present a preliminary investigation into applying dimension extraction methods from coevolutionary algorithm theory to the analysis of student-problem performance in a computer programming instruction context. Specifically, we explore using the dimension extraction coevolutionary algorithm (DECA) from coevo-lution and co-optimization theory (Buc...
What are the concepts in introductory programming that are easy/hard for students? We propose to use Dimension Extraction algorithm (DECA) inspired by coevolution and co-optimization theory to answer this question. We propose and use the metrics of informatively easy/hard concepts to identify programming concepts that are solved correctly by the mo...
Computer Science Principles (CSP) will become an Advanced Placement course during the 2016-17 school year, and there is an immediate need to train new teachers to be leaders in computing classrooms. From 2012-2015, the Beauty and Joy of Computing team offered professional development (PD) to 133 teachers, resulting in 89 BJC CSP courses taught in h...
In a promotional video recently released by code.org (2013), Will.i.am states “great coders are today’s rock stars”. However, introducing computational thinking into K-12 curricula has been a long and slow process. This paper describes efforts to develop computational thinking activities that can be easily implemented in any science classroom. Stud...
This paper describes lesson plans designed for and implemented in The Citadel's STEM Ambassador Program. STEM Ambassador is a professional development initiative designed to support STEM teaching pedagogies and increase interdisciplinary STEM content in middle and high schools. In ongoing and sustained PD sessions, middle and high school educators...
The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) is a curriculum for the new AP Computer Science Principles course. Over the past 2 years, we have collected post-course surveys from 399 students participating in the BJC course. This paper investigates how the responses of females and students from underrepresented racial minority groups (URMs) differed from t...
In this poster, we describe efforts to assess computational thinking activities that can be easily implemented in any science classroom. Studies have shown that a set of conditions must be met for computational thinking tools to be used in K-12 education and that when they are used, there is a wide spectrum in the level of computational thinking th...
Within higher education, science departments have been making efforts to place more emphasis on improving discipline-specific teaching and learning. One such shift is the increased hiring of Science Faculty with Educational Specialties (SFES). While SFES have begun to multiply in number, there is little published on their teaching ideologies and cl...
The current generation ofMassiveOpenOnline Courses (MOOCs) operate under the assumption that good students will help poor students, thus alleviating the burden on instructors and Teaching Assistants (TAs) of having thousands of students to teach. In practice, this may not be the case. In this paper, we examine social network graphs drawn from forum...
given the importance of technology in today's society, many teacher professional development (tPd) efforts incorporate instructional technologies. however, little is known about how to adequately support teachers in the use of these in-structional technologies following tPd. Supporting teach-ers in geographically distant schools is particularly cha...
H ave you ever ordered iced tea at a restaurant? Did the server ask if you wanted your tea sweetened or unsweetened? If you order sweetened iced tea in the southern United States, which is know as sweet tea, then it will be sweetened while the tea is still hot and then allowed to cool before ice is added. In other parts of the country, the iced tea...
A s students enter the classroom, the atmosphere is energetic. It's a Friday, which in this science class is STEM Career Day. The screen at the front of the classroom projects an image of a motorcycle designer, whose engineering career will be featured at the beginning of class. The teacher, Ms. Aguilar, and her eighth-grade students are participat...
Internationally, efforts to increase student interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers have been on the rise. It is often the goal of such efforts that increased interest in STEM careers should stimulate economic growth and enhance innovation. Scientific and educational organizations recommend that efforts to inte...
A s students enter the science classroom, they walk around the yellow crime scene tape that marks off a set of muddy footprints on the floor (Figure 1). Looking in the secured crime scene area, students may notice computer cords with empty spaces where the computers used to be, large pieces of broken glass on the floor, and red " blood " drops on a...
Projects
Projects (6)
Goal 1: In collaboration with P-5 teachers, design and implement lessons and activities to support integration of key computing, computational thinking, and problem-solving skills into their classrooms.
Objective 1a: Collaborate with classroom teachers to design computational thinking lessons and activities that integrate computing, computational thinking, and problem-solving skills with appropriate content-area and computer science standards.
Objective 1b: Modify interdisciplinary, CT-integrated lessons, activities, and assessments for classrooms in light of formative assessments of P-5 students’ classroom work and teacher reflection.
Objective 1c: Compare implementation of CT lessons and activities across content areas and grade levels by drawing upon both video observation of classroom teaching and student work samples.
Goal 2: In collaboration with school leaders and P-5 teachers, develop school-level systems for teachers’ learning about computational thinking and how to integrate computational thinking standards into content area teaching.
Objective 2a: Collaborate with teachers to design consistent, ongoing supports for teachers’ learning about computational thinking and about integrating computational thinking into content-area teaching.
Objective 2b: Analyze the developmental trajectories through which teachers travel as they design and implement lessons that integrate a focus on computational thinking into content-area teaching.
Objective 2c: Analyze how different teacher learning supports, including mentorship, collaborative teacher work time, reflection, and co-teaching, influence teachers’ opportunities for professional learning.
The major goals and objectives of the DEMAND project are:
Goal 1: Connect all Maker activities to challenging science, technology, engineering & mathematics (STEM), social studies and/or ELA content and innovative technologies.
Objective 1a: Students will demonstrate increased content knowledge.
Objective 1b: Students will demonstrate increased self-efficacy and learner agency.
Goal 2: Determine the efficacy of standards-based Maker kits.
Goal 3: Build a responsive and sustained district capacity for Maker activities.
Objective 3a: District will make positive progress towards DEMAND goals.
Objective 3b: Teachers will continue to use activities.
Objective 3c: Teachers and coaches will recruit more teachers.
Objective 3d: All school personnel are aware of the Maker kit opportunities.
Goal 1: In conjunction with STEM teachers, design and implement equitable computing pedagogies and activities to enhance learning across STEM+C disciplines.
Goal 2: Understand how contexts (team/individual) and cultures (NC/SC) impact integration of computing into STEM+C disciplines.
Goal 3: Explicitly connect state/national STEM and computing standards, the school curriculum and the classroom context.
