Unpacking teachers’ concerns about CT-based pedagogy: The case of software education in Korea

We adopt the concerns-based adoption model as an analytical lens to explore how Korean teachers perceive the mandated changes brought about by the policy to teach software (SW) education. The research questions are (a) How can teachers be grouped according to their perceived SW knowledge/skills and pedagogical beliefs? (b) What are the overall trends in teachers' stages of concern about SW education? and (c) How are the stages of concern about SW education distributed according to the different teacher types? The participants were 207 teachers who completed the online survey. Data were collected about their perceived SW knowledge/skills, pedagogical beliefs, and the seven stages of concern related to SW education. First, K-means clustering was performed to categorize teachers into four types based on their SW knowledge/skills and pedagogical beliefs. Overall, our findings indicate that 40% of the participants belonged to Type I, who have high SW knowledge/skills and pedagogical beliefs. Second, the concerns profile in Type I showed an M pattern in which they hold both self and impact concerns. Types II–IV showed a similar trend, such that the trends peak at Stage 0 (Awareness) and the intense concerns at the self-level (Stage 1, Informational and Stage 2, Personal). All types demonstrated a tailing up phenomenon at Stage 6 (Refocusing). This study has implications for the design of concern-based interventions and makes suggestions to enable teachers to move toward more advanced levels to adopt computational thinking-based pedagogy in SW education.