Identifying the vocational high school students' computational thinking skills and computational thinking skills self-efficacy perception

Computational thinking skill are a 21st century skill that is important for everyone and needs to be developed. Computational thinking skill also important for vocational high school students, as they contribute significantly to their academic and professional success. The purpose of this study is to determine the computational thinking skills and computational thinking self-efficacy perception scores of vocational high school students according to their grades and to examine correlation between computational thinking skills and computational thinking self-efficacy The sample of the research consisted of 931 vocational and technical high school students studying in Istanbul during the 2023-2024 academic year. The data were collected with the Computational Thinking Skill Self-Efficacy Perception Scale (CTSEP) and the Computational Thinking Skill Scale. In order to analyses of the data one-way ANOVA and Pearson Correlation were used. The outstanding finding was a moderate, positive, and statistically significant relationship between CTS and CTSEP at all grade levels. These findings show that the development of students' computational thinking skills is directly related to their self-efficacy perceptions of these skills. The other significant finding was that 12th-grade students scored significantly higher than 10th and 11th-grade students in terms of both skill level and self-efficacy perception.