Data science tools in the analysis of developing inquiry skills and computational thinking within the “IT Academy” Project

Abstract

We present our ideas how to apply modern data science technology and methodology to effectively prepare and statistically analyze large educational datasets which in our case map inquiry skills and computational thinking developed by students in primary and secondary schools at the Slovak national scale, within the project “IT Academy - Education for the 21st Century”. Combining the top two open-source data science tools, Python (within Jupyter notebooks) and R (within R studio software), we illustrate some of results from data preprocessing (cleaning, wrangling) for the diagnostic primary-school test of inquiry skills where Python tools (e.g. Pandas library) became more advantageous. As for the subsequent intensive statistical analysis, R environment was more suitable. We demonstrate summary results of the statistical analysis of the computer thinking diagnostic test for primary and secondary schools, finally cross-checked in SPSS software. Due to the current COVID-19 situation, we are still collecting data from ITA project impacts for which we finally show how we plan to implement further methods for data collecting, analysis and implementation in collaboration with our colleagues - education researchers.