Designing and comparing two Scratch-based teaching approaches for students aged 10-12 years in Dutch primary education
Summary
Programming and computational thinking are becoming more important in primary education, but in research there is little information about effective ways to teach students programming. Also, many teachers do not know how to teach this subject. We designed two teaching approaches to teach students on elementary schools how to program. One approach followed the instructionistic 4C/ID model, the other approach followed constructionism. The learning gains of these two approaches were compared using a pre- and posttest. This provided more insight into the difference between learning gains of these two approaches. In total, 129 students from two different schools participated. A significant difference (p = .037, d = .59) between the two approaches was found on one of the schools. This difference was in favour of the 4C/ID approach. On the other school and for the total group no significant difference was found. This can be explained by the fact that the students on the different schools have different backgrounds. However, there are a few openings for future research.