Department of Psychology, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey.
Br J Educ Psychol. 2021 Dec;91(4):1434-1455. doi: 10.1111/bjep.12429. Epub 2021 May 27.
Coding has been added to school curricula in several countries, being one of the necessary competencies of the 21st century. Although it has also been suggested to foster the development of several cognitive skills such as computational thinking and problem-solving, studies on the effects of coding are very limited, provide mixed results, and lack causal evidence.
This study aims to evaluate the impact of a learn-to-code programme on three cognitive skills in children: computational thinking, fluid intelligence, and spatial orientation, using a randomized trial.
One hundred seventy-four (n = 81 girls) 4th-grade children participated in the study.
Children were randomly assigned to one of the three 10-week learning programmes: learn-to-code (treatment of interest), mathematics (another STEM-related comparison treatment), and reading (control). Children responded to paper-pencil computational thinking, and spatial orientation measurements, and face-to-face matrix reasoning task at pre- and post-tests.
Results showed that children's computational thinking scores increased significantly only in the learn-to-code condition. Fluid intelligence significantly increased in all conditions, possibly due to a practice effect. The spatial orientation did not improve in any of the conditions.
These findings suggested that learning to code can be selectively beneficial for the development of computational thinking skills while not effective for spatial reasoning and fluid intelligence.
编程已被纳入多个国家的学校课程，成为 21 世纪的必要技能之一。虽然也有人建议培养计算思维和解决问题等多种认知技能，但关于编程影响的研究非常有限，结果喜忧参半，缺乏因果证据。
本研究旨在通过随机试验评估一项学习编程计划对儿童三种认知技能的影响：计算思维、流体智力和空间定向。
174 名（n=81 名女孩）四年级儿童参加了这项研究。
儿童被随机分配到三个为期 10 周的学习计划之一：学习编程（感兴趣的治疗）、数学（另一个与 STEM 相关的比较治疗）和阅读（对照组）。儿童在预测试和后测试中回答纸笔计算思维和空间定向测量以及面对面矩阵推理任务。
结果表明，只有在学习编程条件下，儿童的计算思维得分显著提高。所有条件下的流体智力都显著提高，这可能是由于练习效应。在任何条件下，空间定向都没有改善。
这些发现表明，学习编程可以选择性地有益于计算思维技能的发展，而对空间推理和流体智力没有影响。
