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Despite the numerous benefits of media & information literacy for students in today's digital society, the lack of teacher preparation in teaching media and information literacy skills suggests a gap between the societal rationale for students becoming media literate and the sustainable preparation of teachers. The purpose of this exploratory study was to explore the factors and beliefs underlying preservice teachers' intention to teach media and information literacy in their future classroom according to the theory of planned behavior. Findings suggest that although preservice teachers' have positive attitudes towards media and information literacy as an essential skill for students, they do not feel that it is highlighted in their teacher education program and many do not see other stakeholders including faculty, school administrators and parents as encouraging it. Instructor modeling of media and information literacy may be needed to help preservice teachers develop confidence in integrating it into their future work.

A quality computer science (CS) teacher needs to understand students’ common misconceptions in learning CS. This study explored one aspect of CS teachers’ understanding of student misconceptions: their perceptions of student misconceptions related to introductory programming. Perceptions in this study included three parts: teachers’ perceived frequency of a student misconception, teachers’ perceived importance of a misconception in learning, and teachers’ confidence in addressing a misconception. Teachers in our study taught a Python-based CS course for high schools students. A survey was designed and administered to assess teachers’ perceptions of students’ misconceptions. Our results indicated that teachers’ confidence of addressing misconceptions and the teaching context may affect their perceptions of student misconceptions. We also found that some latent misconceptions are likely to lead to a perception of low frequency as they can be more difficult to detect. Moreover, our study found that teachers’ degrees and additional computing training showed positive relationships with their confidence of addressing student misconceptions and that additional computing training also showed a positive relationship with teachers’ perceived importance of student misconceptions. Implications of the findings for future research and practice of CS education are discussed.

The current efforts to expand computer science (CS) education in K-12 schools, such as the “CS for All” initiative, highlight the need for all students to get an opportunity to study computing. However, as recent research has shown, diversity in computing at the K-12 level remains problematic, and additional research is needed to look at how computer science learning environments can impact minority student interest and retention in CS. In this article, we report results from an in-depth qualitative study of high school computer science teachers’ perspective on barriers to increasing diversity in their classes. Based on teachers’ experiences, we provide practical recommendations on how to encourage equitable learning environments in K-12 computer science courses.