Computer science and non-computer science GCSE computational thinking skills.
Andrew Joyce‐Gibbons · Durham Research Online (Durham University) · 2018
Background: Since the reboot of Computer Science in the national curriculum in England, the teaching of Computer Science (CS) remains widely varied in quality.Many teachers continue to lack confidence to teach the subject and uptake by girls remains low (Royal Society, 2017).Nevertheless the CS curriculum contains a range of reasoning skills strongly desired by employers.Computational thinking has grown to consist of three main domains: computational concepts, computational practices, and computational perspectives (Brennan & Resnick, 2012).While these form a core focus of the CS curriculum, computational thinking skills, especially computational practices, can be useful to students in a range of classes within the curriculum (Selby, Dorling & Woollard, 2014).This paper explores to what extent GCSE and non-GCSE students differ in their computational concepts, practices and perspectives.Perhaps it is necessary to study CS to develop advanced competency in these key areas or perhaps they are so closely related to mathematical problem solving skills and approaches that there is no discernible difference between learners who study Mathematics alone and those who also additionally study Computer Science.