Factors affecting middle school students computational thinking

This study aims to determine to what extent students' attitudes towards programming and mathematics, their self-efficacy in mathematics, computational self-efficacy, sex, and whether they had already taken codding classes or not affect their computational thinking skills. Within this scope, the study group of this research is a total of 689 students consisting of 5th, 6th and 7th grade students from secondary schools in Istanbul. The research was conducted using the relational survey model, one of the quantitative research methods. In order to collect quantitative data utilized in this research, Self-Efficacy Perception Scale for Computational Thinking Skill, Scale for Middle School Students' Attitudes Towards Mathematics, Mathematics Self-Efficacy Perception Scale, Scale for Middle School Students' Attitudes Towards Programming, Computational Thinking Scale were used. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS 26. As the data exhibited a normal distribution in normality tests, One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Multiple Linear Regression Analyses of parametric statistical techniques were conducted. Furthermore, Tukey test of Post-Hoc methods and Pearson's Product-Moment Correlation Test as a correlation test were used. The findings obtained from the research herein show that the most influential independent variable on computational thinking skills is the attitude variable towards programming. In addition, the results suggest that students' mathematics self-efficacy and attitude towards mathematics also significantly affect their computational thinking skills. It is further observed that students' sex, computational thinking self-efficacy, and whether they had already taken codding classes or not, do not have a statistically significant effect on students' computational thinking.