Supporting Primary School Programming Education through Formative Feedback

Children are increasingly surrounded by computer science aspects in their everyday life. Primary school education aims at empowering children to participate in and reflect on their environment. Therefore, computer science related contents such as programming are increasingly introduced into primary school curricula. However, this also involves challenges in particular for teachers, who need to familiarise themselves with the new curriculum. As a result, primary school teachers often struggle to help primary school children with their programming issues. Corrective feedback given during the learning process (i. e. formative feedback) can help by promoting cognitive factors such as content knowledge. This thesis therefore aims to support primary school programming education through formative feedback. In order to shed light on different perspectives, both teachers and children participated in the studies in a mixed methods design. Teachers’ challenges and children’s programming issues were explored as a basis for knowing what both target groups struggle with. This was done by conducting content analysis on the challenges and issues collected and using the resulting categories for further quantitative analysis. The effects of different characteristics of feedback on the effectiveness and efficiency of teaching and learning programming were then explained. This was done by asking the teachers and children to explain their ratings and conducting content analysis on their explanations. The support of primary school programming education through formative feedback builds on the major challenge of teachers’ lack of content knowledge and the corresponding strategies of teacher training and automated feedback. Indeed, automated feedback was found to be mostly helpful for debugging and task creation. In order to provide direct support to children, common programming issues were identified in terms of the understanding of programming concepts and the usage of the programming environment. Effects on children’s learning and their preferences were identified for several feedback characteristics, leading for example to elaborated hints instead of simple direct instructions. Based on these results, a formative feedback approach of hint cards was developed and evaluated. The hint cards approach proved to be a useful example strategy for supporting primary school programming education through formative feedback.

Level thesis:degree_level

thesis.doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher

Universität Passau

Year

2024

Author dc:creator

• Greifenstein, Luisa

Contributors dc:contributor

• Fraser, Gordon

• feedback
• programming education
• primary school education

Statement dc:rights

• Creative Commons - CC BY-SA - Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International

Repository record source_url

https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-uni-passau/frontdoor/index/index/docId/1518

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:kobv.de-opus4-uni-passau:1518