The Role of Gender and Confidence in Pre-Service Teachers’ Computational Thinking Skills in an Undergraduate Introductory Educational Technology Course (Learning Sciences)
Maria Cutumisu · 2019 Conference of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education · 2019
Computational thinking (CT) is one of the most important competencies of the 21 st century. However, there are very few CT assessments in the literature and even fewer are validated empirically. Also, it is not known yet how pre-service teachers’ CT skills relate to their confidence and gender, as research indicates the importance of role-models in peaking students’ interest in coding skills and retaining them in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics careers. This research aims to assess whether there are any gender differences in 21 st -century CT skills and confidence of pre-service teachers in an introductory educational technology course at a large university in Western Canada. At the beginning of the course, n = 94 pre-service teachers answered a questionnaire that included a subset of 15 items from a validated assessment of CT skills, CTt. Results show that pre-service teachers’ CTt performance correlated with their confidence in their performance completing the overall test. Although there were no differences in pre-service teachers’ CTt performance across gender, males were significantly more confident about how they performed on the overall test than females, confirming prior research results. Implications include interventions for improving the confidence of female pre-service teachers to commensurate with their performance.