Can Computational Thinking help me? A quantitative study of its effects on education

Abstract

Some researchers consider that the benefits of Computational Thinking (CT) in education are unclear, and therefore a quantitative study to understand the effects of CT skills in the basic levels of formal education is needed. The present study aims to analyze the effects of CT on the academic performance of students in high school. We seek to answer the following research questions: (RQ1) Can CT increase the problem-solving skills of students in high school? (RQ2) Is CT related to the performance of students in high school? (RQ3) Can CT improve the performance of students in high school? We conducted an analysis between two groups of students with similar profiles belonging to the same population, where the factor CT proficiency is the only feature that distinguishes both groups. The results show that there is a moderate correlation between the performance of evaluated students and their skills of CT developed by computer programming. In addition, we found that students proficient in computer programming have superior performance up to 10.2% in ENEM (National Exam of High School) assessment compared to those with little or no experience level and even better performance 21% in the WASI test problem-solving in students on attending high school.