Moving Through the Messy Middle: Longitudinal Case Studies of Teachers' Computational Thinking Infusion
Citation
Jocius, Robin; Joshi, Deepti; Blanton, Melanie; Albert, Jennifer; O'Byrne, W. Ian. (2025) Moving through the messy middle: Longitudinal case studies of teachers' computational thinking infusion. Technology, Knowledge and Learning, 30, 2149–2173. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-025-09886-y
Abstract
TPACK (technological pedagogical content knowledge) has been widely used as a framework for understanding and creating teacher professional development experiences with technology, including teacher learning about programming and computational thinking (CT), which refers to the set of problem-solving practices inherent to the computer science discipline. However, one persistent gap in the knowledge base is the need for research that examines teachers' development of new pedagogical practices over an extended period of time. This study contributes a longitudinal perspective on teacher learning about computational thinking in relation to three TPACK domains: pedagogical content knowledge, technological content knowledge, and technological pedagogical content knowledge. Qualitative data from a five-year study of teachers' CT integration, including interviews, surveys, programming products, pedagogical artifacts, and practitioner research projects, were analyzed to unpack how two case study teachers (secondary math and science) came to understand CT and coding concepts, as well as how they utilized CT-infused teaching practices in their classrooms. Findings suggest that as teachers developed clear understandings of CT and more sophisticated knowledge of programming concepts, they were able to design scaffolded and sequential CT learning experiences for students and colleagues.
Notes
The title says it all — the "messy middle" is where teacher learning actually happens, and it's the part that most PD research skips over. We tend to study teachers at the start of a program and again at the end. What happens in between, the confusion, the backsliding, the slow recalibration of what counts as "good teaching" — that usually gets compressed into a tidy narrative of growth.
This paper pushed back on that. Five years with two case study teachers gave us enough time to see the actual texture of how CT understanding develops. It isn't linear. Teachers circled back to foundational concepts, hit walls with specific programming ideas, and then made unexpected leaps. The TPACK framework was useful here precisely because it let us separate out what teachers knew about CT as a discipline from what they knew about how to teach it — those two things developed at different rates.
The longitudinal design was hard to pull off. Keeping two teachers engaged across five years, tracking data across that many cycles of PD, holding the research questions stable while the context kept shifting — that's a different kind of work than a pre/post study. But I think it's the kind of work the field needs more of.