Integrating coding across the curriculum: rhetoric and reality

Coding and the associated computational thinking skills have been hailed as the new literacy for the 21st century, and teachers across the globe have been encouraged to incorporate coding into their classroom programs to prepare their students for the future. In the face of an overcrowded curriculum, coding is often taught through integration with other curriculum areas in the form of creative projects. It is commonly believed that, through such integration, students will develop problem-solving skills by exercising computational thinking through thinking processes such as problem decomposition, abstraction, pattern recognition, and algorithms.

In the research associated with this thesis, I conducted a scoping review to examine the empirical evidence of learning that results from integrating coding across the curriculum. Following a design-based research methodology, I also conducted a series of case studies in four Australian middle-school classrooms (Years 5–7). In these case studies, I made classroom observations, analysed student screen recordings, analysed student Scratch projects, conducted pre- and post-intervention questionnaires, and interviewed teachers and students. My findings shed light on the nature of thinking processes and coding practices that students use when they participate in an English–technology integrated learning unit focused on coding animated narratives (CANs).

The results of my research are reported in four publications. In the first publication, I examined students’ coding processes through analysing over 60 hours of screen recordings. The findings challenge common assumptions about students’ problem-solving processes and the role of computational thinking. In the second publication, I examined the challenges that non-specialist teachers face teaching coding as an integrated task in mainstream secondary and primary schools. The third publication revealed the tensions and opportunities that integrating coding into school curricula brings to learning computer science concepts. The fourth publication is an in-depth case study of the pedagogical, curriculum design, and ecological system factors that contributed to the success of implementing an integrated coding curriculum that also fostered students’ general capabilities.

The issues that traverse through all my publications relate to common assumptions about the relationship between computational thinking and coding, the practices of non-specialist teachers, and the impact of the school context on students’ learning of coding and computer science. My research clarifies the learning outcomes that may be expected through integrating coding across the curriculum, and it also provides an in-depth analysis of the ecological system factors that have an impact on coding taught through creative, cross-curricular tasks.