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Impact of Computational Thinking on the Metacognitive Skills of Primary School Students

10.24050/reia.v22i43.1825
Published 2025-01-01
Articles

Abstract

Abstract. Computational thinking skills, particularly abstraction, algorithmic thinking, debugging, and decomposition, are closely associated with metacognitive processes. Given the overlap between these two processes, it could be suggested that teaching computational thinking has the potential to develop students' metacognitive strategies and influence their problem-solving abilities and learning outcomes (Yadav et al., 2022). The current study aimed to explore the effect of teaching computational thinking on specific metacognitive skills such as working memory. It consisted of a quasi-experimental study with a pretest-posttest design and a control group. Seventy-three fifth-grade students participated (experimental group N=43; control group N=30). The metamemory test from the BANFE-2 battery (Flores-Lázaro et al., 2014) was used as the outcome measure. The intervention involved training in computational thinking through COGNI-MACHINE, designed by the first author, which was implemented as workshops twice a week over twelve weeks. The results of the repeated measures ANOVA indicated that the experimental group, compared to the control group, showed a significant difference in total metamemory indicators and positive errors, with medium and small effect sizes, respectively, after the training. These findings suggest that learning computational thinking has a favorable effect on the development of students' metamemory.

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Authors

  • Carolina Robledo Castro

    Colombia

  • Luz Helena Rodriguez Rodriguez

    Colombia

  • Gisella Bonilla-Santos

    Colombia

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