Effects of computational thinking skills to the success of secondary school students in programming instruction

In this research, activities are designed in order to improve 6th grade students' computational thinking skills in programming instruction. The aim of this study is to examine the effects of this method on students' success and computational thinking skills. In this context, experimental and control groups were formed. In the control group, traditional instruction with programming was carried out. In the experimental group, computatinal thinking skills were integrated into the lesson activities. Problem solving, demonstration and question-answer methods were used in the lessons. In this study, mixed method was applied as a research method. In the 2017-2018 academic year, 60 students from two different classes of a secondary school, located in Ataşehir/İstanbul, participated in the study. In this instruction, the achievement test developed by the researcher and the "Computational Thinking Skills Level" scale developed by Korkmaz, et al (2015a) used as quantitative data collection tools. These tools were applied to the experimental and control groups before and after the instruction. As a qualitative data collection tool, the semi-structured interview form was applied to the experimental group in order to determine the opinions of the students about the computational thinking skills after programming instruction with Scratch. Independent Samples T Test, Mann Whitney-U Test, Wilcoxon Sign Test were applied in the analysis of quantitative data. Content analysis method was applied in the qualitative data analysis. It was concluded that there was a significant difference in favor of the experimental group as a result of comparison of pre-test and post-test score differences between experimental and control groups. The method in which computational thinking skills are integrated into the target behaviours has been effective in increasing academic achievement. When the average score differences between pre-instruction and post-instruction computational thinking skills are compared; no significant difference was found in all sub-dimensions except creativity sub-dimension. In the creativity sub-dimension, it was determined that there was a significant difference in favor of the control group. In addition, no significant relationship was found between post-test & pre-test score differences and post-score & pre-score differences of the computational thinking skills of the experimental group. According to the results of the semi-structured interview form, the majority of the students stated that they like the lesson. Contributions of programming to Mathematics, learning coding, designing their own games are the positive opinions of the students. However, the noise in the class and Scratch activities expected to be done in a short time are the negative opinions of the students. Some participants stated that they have difficulty in some of the Scratch activities. In addition, the students expressed that they gained the skills of cooperation, reasoning, problem solving, planned study and producing at the end of the programming instruction.