The effectiveness of unplugged activities and programming exercises in computational thinking education: A Meta-analysis

Debugging in Computational Thinking: A Meta-analysis on the Effects of Interventions on Debugging Skills

“…Sun et al (2021) examined the impact of programming activities on K-12 students' CT skills and found an effect of 0.60 standard-deviation units ( SE = 0.05). Li et al (2022) also examined general CT skills following one of two types of intervention. An overall effect size of g¯ = 0.39 ( SE = 0.04) was seen for “unplugged activities” and a mean of g¯ = 0.58 ( SE = 0.08) was reported for programming exercises.…”

“…This includes measures such as qualitative or quantitative ratings of code quality and number of errors generated (e.g., Chung & Hsiao, 2020;Denny et al, 2014). Additionally, researchers have used various measures of debugging skills, such as number of attempts to create correct code, numbers of lines of code edited (e.g., Liu et al, 2017;Price et al, 2020) and time taken to solve the bug (e.g., Ko & Myers, 2004;Lin et al, 2017;White, 2009). These evaluation metrics are most commonly assessed on pre-defined debugging tasks within controlled environments (e.g., Ko & Myers, 2004;Lane & VanLehn, 2005), or on student-generated code in an ecologically valid environment, such as an introductory CS course Price et al, 2020).…”

“…Based on the literature we coded four types of outcome: time spent to debug or complete tasks, correctness of program code, number of bugs solved, and efficiency (i.e., number of compiles or edits taken to arrive at the correct solution). Two common measures of debugging skill include accuracy of code (e.g., Chung & Hsiao, 2020;Denny et al, 2014), and time spent on problem solving (e.g., Ko & Myers, 2004;Lin et al, 2017). Students are expected to spend less time to debug and complete tasks after training, and to make fewer edits or attempts at corrections compared with students who did not receive any training or received less training; effects from studies using these types of measure were reverse coded so that positive effects represented better performance (e.g., less time spent) by treated samples.…”

“…Intervals are ordered by study author(s) and plotted using within-study standard errors. Some studies (e.g., Lin et al, 2017;Ko & Myers, 2004;White, 2009, outcome 3) reported very large effect sizes with large standard errors resulting from their small samples (ns of 16, 9, and 7 respectively). The plot also reveals that most studies provided more than one effect size.…”

Examining computer science education of Asia-Pacific countries successful in the PISA

“…Additionally, it is reported that the regular presence of CS lessons in the school will help the general learning processes of the students (Chauhan, 2017;Lei et al, 2020;Merino-Armero, González-Calero, & Cozar-Gutierrez, 2022). It can help develop basic skills such as "problem-solving", "analytical thinking", and "creativity" which are considered 21stcentury skills (Florez et al, 2017;Grover & Pea, 2013;Li et al, 2022). It is stated that CS and programming education can support students in many ways in a learning environment.…”