A Qualitative Exploration of Student Preconceptions of Computational Thinking

Perez Lacera, Luisa

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A Qualitative Exploration of Student Preconceptions of Computational Thinking

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Computational Thinking is commonly considered an important skill to learn in today’s day and age. It opens opportunities for students to find careers in STEM disciplines as well as prepare students for higher learning. However, due to there being no singular definition and thus no form of assessment or widespread mode of learning, there is a barrier to teaching computational thinking. This Master’s thesis will be broken into three parts. The first part will explore the various definitions of computational thinking, why it is important, and how we have generated a taxonomy based on previous work for a content knowledge developing technology platform. The second part describes the online study, which aims to answer two research questions: 1) Do student answers largely match researcher designed intentions? 2) Which themes emerge among student responses on the items with the most and least agreement? The study that is performed on undergraduate college students and the materials that were developed will also be discussed. The third part aims to explore student responses in computational thinking from the designed vignettes as well as go over results and discussion.

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