Computational thinking in educational policy – the relationship between goals and practices

In this paper, we study the relationship between the content and goals of curricu-lum revisions toward the integration of computational thinking (CT) in compulso-ry schools in Denmark, Sweden, and England. Our analyses build on data con-sisting of a combination of official documents such as new curricula, white pa-pers, and implementation strategies and interviews of experts who are either high-ly knowledgeable about or were involved in developing the curriculum revisions in these three countries. Our study found that there are strong connections be-tween the CT content data practices and goal competitiveness in England. In Sweden, we found that the relationship between data practices and the goal of competitiveness is strongest. In Denmark, we found that the CT content codes re-lated to data practices, modeling and simulation practices, and computational problem solving practices were all strongly represented, but all were weakly re-lated to policy goals.