Investigating Students’ Computational Thinking Skills on Matter Module

Abstract

The revolution of the fourth industrial has impacted most aspect of our life and demanding a paradigm shift including education. It has become to our attention that there is a need to inculcate complex problem-solving skills among youth to equipped them to face the challenges in the era of digital technology. To fulfill the needs, computational thinking was introduced in school curriculum in Malaysia in 2017. It is still rather new, and this creates opportunity to understand how computational thinking can best be integrated in teaching and learning. In this study, we developed a module for a science topic, Matter and examine its impact on computational thinking skills on 65 students at secondary level. The computational thinking skills integrated in this study were abstraction, decomposition, algorithm, generalization, and evaluation. A quasi-experimental method was employed, and the ANCOVA result showed that there was no significant difference between control and treatment group on computational thinking skills. However, the score means for each of the computational thinking skills for both groups, showed that three skills in the treatment group were higher than the control group. The three computational thinking skills were decomposition, evaluation, and algorithm. This study suggested that CT involved mental process and proper planning is crucial to integrate computational thinking skills as teaching and learning is very contextual in nature.