Understanding Teachers’ Attitudes and Self-Assessment Towards Computational Thinking

Abstract

Around the world, attention is being paid to computational thinking (CT) in education. Integration into school curricula places additional demands on teachers, promoting the skills and attitudes necessary to teach and integrate CT into education. Above all, it is important that teachers themselves are aware of the importance of CT and have a clear perception of its meaning. To enable an effective and developmentally-enhancing implementation of CT in education, teachers must have competence to teach CT, recognize from what age CT can be taught, and how to transfer the acquired CT skills to other school subjects and areas. Therefore, we collected and compared data among schoolteachers from four different countries to enlighten their attitudes towards CT, their opinion about opportunities and possibilities for integrating CT into education, and how and from what age CT can best be applied. Furthermore, by administering and evaluating the Beginners Computational Thinking Test (BCTt), teachers' perspectives regarding this validated instrument for the assessment of CT are analysed. From qualitative data obtained, we could deduce information about teachers' self-assessment of competence, confidence, and motivation to teach CT. From quantitative data collected by administering the BCTt to teachers, we obtained indications of teachers' mastery of CT competence. The data analysis confirmed our hypothesis that discrepancies exist between teachers' self-assessment and their actual CT competence. It can be argued that the findings from our research, therefore, provide valuable information for further shaping teachers' future professionalisation concerning CT.