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Computational Thinking as Instrument to Evaluate Student Difficulties in Higher Education: Before and During Pandemic Analysis

Abstract:

Computational Thinking is a subject that has motivated different researches, especially to those searching a more specific definition. Regarding higher education, there are studies only from teacher’s standpoint without considering students’ perspectives. The main goal of this study is to describe the results obtained from computational thinking implementation in order to identify and compare student’s difficulties in programming subjects. The methodology applied was through a nonexperimental longitudinal study with the participation of 1.112 students of second semester of the engineering school from an Ecuadorian public university, during the period between September/2019 and October/2021. Findings in the period before pandemic showed that the main difficulty was related to the use the tool and language syntax; while for the periods along the pandemic, the main difficulties were associated to institutional and personal factors. Also, it was verified that the percentage of difficulties in virtual mode is higher than in face-to-face modality. With those results, it is pretended that teachers have enough means to identify representative difficulties from students during a class and can offer an opportune help.