Oldal 158 [158]
OCR
13.3 INVESTIGATING YOUNG SCHOOL STUDENTS’ COMPUTATIONAL... 157 been mandatory for pupils in the UK from age five upwards (Brown, Sentance, Crick, & Humphreys, 2014), and a growing recognition of the importance of CS education is observable in other countries too (European Schoolnet, 2015). In addition, Mannila et al. (2014) report on a survey distributed to K-9 teachers, aiming at revealing to what extent different aspects of CT are already part of the current curricula in various European countries and the U.S. These focused endeavours implicitly suggest that current curricula do not contribute sufficiently to the development of learners’ CT. Several studies emphasize that computing students lack a variety of skills that programming ability would require (Ahadi, Lister, Lal, Leinonen, & Hellas, 2017; Evans & Simkin, 1989; Simon, Chen, Lewandowski, McCartney, & Sanders, 2006). On the other hand, since CT is a combined skill with cross-disciplinary implications (Feaster, Ali, Zhai, & Hallstrom, 2014), one might conclude that, even without an explicit focus on CS education, students’ CT might develop latently as they advance with the current curriculum. For example, Lewandowski and his colleagues report on a series of computing projects with the goal of identifying the commonsense knowledge beginners bring to the study of CS (Lewandowski et al., 2010). While the majority of previous research focuses on assessing the CT level of certain age-groups, the present study was motivated by the following basic question: Is there any detectable incidental progress in students’ CT during their K-9 education? Instead of using one of the general CT tests proposed by previous works in the field (Romän-Gonzälez et al., 2018; Shute et al., 2017), we chose to follow the same approach the authors of the above-referred computing project applied. More explicitly, the main research question we addressed is: are there any detectable differences in how 3"4-, 5th-, 7-, and 9'"-grade learners (without any explicit prior experience with CT) relate to learning tasks that assume a certain level of CT? More specifically: — What is the pace of the potential CT growth? — Does the rate and pace of CT growth depend on the nature of the current curriculum (arts vs. theoretical schools)? — To what extent can students of different grade levels assimilate a basic computer algorithm (linear search)? — To what extent are there signs of advanced CT at different grade levels? — Does the rate and pace of CT growth depend on the gender of the learners?
