Computational thinking has become one of those skills we want students to develop at an increasingly early age. But this raises a fairly basic question: are the people who will be teaching it actually prepared to do so? This is precisely the starting point of the study by Juan González-Martínez, Marta Peracaula-Bosch, and Rafel Meyerhofer-Parra.
Their approach makes intuitive sense: before teaching future educators how to develop computational thinking in children, it is worth making sure that they themselves can think and work within that framework. To find out how far this could be achieved in a reasonable amount of time, the authors followed 71 pre-service teachers who received intensive training based mainly on visual programming with Scratch.
The results reveal a particularly interesting pattern: the training seems to benefit everyone, but not in the same way. The average score on the computational thinking test rose from 19.5 to 21.9 points, with a meaningful effect size (d=0.6), but those who started at the lowest levels were precisely the ones who improved the most. Among students who already had a high initial level, progress was reflected mainly in their ability to solve problems more quickly.
In other words, the intervention does not appear simply to favour those who already have a knack for programming; it also seems to have a certain compensatory effect. Moreover, the better the Scratch project students produced, the higher their subsequent computational thinking scores tended to be: students whose projects were rated at the lower level averaged 18.9 on the final test, compared with 24.6 among those who produced the strongest projects.
It is important, however, not to turn this association into a stronger claim than the study can support. There was no control group, and the research used a pre-experimental design, so we cannot determine with certainty how much of the improvement was specifically due to Scratch rather than to other components of the course. Even so, the article leaves us with a powerful pedagogical idea: knowing activities for teaching a skill is not enough; teachers should first experience and develop that skill themselves.
Here, Scratch functions less as an end in itself than as a small laboratory in which future teachers have to break problems down, construct solutions, make mistakes, and correct them. Only then does the distinctly pedagogical question arise: how can they help others learn to do the same? That sequence (first becoming a competent and reflective user, and then becoming a teacher) may well be the study’s most transferable contribution.
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How to Cite: González-Martínez, J., Peracaula-Bosch, M., & Meyerhofer-Parra, R. (2024). Impact of intensive programming training on the development of Computational Thinking in prospective teachers. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 27(1), 187–208. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.27.1.37672
