Conceptions and Misconceptions about Computational Thinking among Italian Primary School Teachers

Abstract

Many advanced countries are recognizing more and more the importance of teaching computing, in some cases even as early as in primary school. "Computational thinking" is the term often used to denote the conceptual core of computer science or "the way a computer scientist thinks", as Wing put it. Such term -given also the lack of a widely accepted definition -has become a "buzzword" meaning different things to different people. We investigated the Italian primary school teachers' conceptions about computational thinking by analyzing the results of a survey (N=972) conducted in the context of "Programma il Futuro" project. Teachers have been asked to provide a definition of computational thinking and to answer three additional related closed-ended questions. The analysis shows that, while almost half of teachers (43.4%) have included in their definitions some fundamental elements of computational thinking, very few (10.8%) have been able to provide an acceptably complete definition. On a more positive note, the majority is aware that computational thinking is not characterized by coding or by the use of information technology.

An Investigation of Italian Primary School Teachers’ View on Coding and Programming

“…A few studies analyzed conceptions and misconceptions about computational thinking in school teachers (see [6]), however none of them specifically investigated their ideas about the relationship between coding and programming.…”

“…We analyzed in [6] a large sample of 972 Italian teachers of primary school (students aged from 6 to 10) to investigate their knowledge level of CT. That analysis was based on the descriptions of CT that teachers in the sample provided by answering to the open-ended question "In my view computational thinking is...". Some of these answers did not provide a definition or were completely out of scope (e.g.…”

“…The questionnaire sent in December 2016 received 3,593 answers from school teachers of all levels, from kindergarten to upper secondary. In [6] we analyzed the 972 answers of primary schools teachers, who participated to the project for the first time in school-year 2016-17, to questions regarding their viewpoint on CT. For the same set of teachers we analyze here their answers to a different set of questions.…”

“…In the current study we considered the same sample of 972 teachers analyzed in [6]. The sample is made up for 93.7% (911) by women, hence 6.3% (61) are men, which is almost the double of the national value (3.6%) for Italian primary school teachers.…”

Growth Mindset in Computational Thinking Teaching and Teacher Training

“…For my Master esis I worked on a literature review of Computational inking and on the cognitive di culties of learning to program. In the rst months of PhD I worked on teacher training: I analyzed [2] teachers' sentiment about Programma il Futuro project and their conceptions and misconceptions [3] about computational thinking. Moreover I'm analyzing data on the effects of a "Creative Computing" course on Primary Education Major students' growth mindset, with promising preliminary results.…”