Pre-Service Computer Science Teachers’ Computational Thinking Attitudes and Performance on Python Tasks

Abstract

For more than a decade, there has been debate about how to describe the concept of computational thinking (CT), focusing on the skills of decomposition, abstraction, pattern recognition, and algorithmic thinking. As CT can also be seen as a problem-solving process, not only the skills and strategies are an important part of CT, but also the attitudes of the problem solvers. These have already been described as persistence, dealing with complexity, ambiguity, and confidence. An important competence for future computer science teachers is to confidently guide students’ problem-solving process. This work presents preliminary results on the relationship between pre-service computer science teachers’ CT attitudes and their performance on Python tasks. Therefore, N=19 pre-service computer science teachers solved three tasks in Python and rated their attitudes towards solving the tasks. However, the preliminary results only allow to draw tentative and interpretative conclusions.