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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.
Sec. Digital Education
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1479729
This article is part of the Research Topic Cognitive Benefits of Technologies Applied to Learning in Education View all 17 articles

The Influence of Mind Mapping on Computational Thinking Skills and Self-Efficacy in Students' Learning of Graphical Programming

Provisionally accepted
Rong Guo Rong Guo *
  • Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Abstract：Computational thinking is regarded as an essential skill for students in the 21st century, and programming is one of the means to cultivate it. This study introduces mind mapping into graphical programming to visualize the cognitive process of computational thinking, aiming to enhance students' computational thinking skills. After a semester of teaching experiments, independent-sample t-tests and paired-sample t-tests were conducted on the data, revealing significant improvements in both computational thinking skills and self-efficacy among the students in the experimental group. Further analysis of the data showed significant enhancements in their algorithmic thinking and modeling, as well as pattern recognition and evaluation sub-skills, while abstraction and decomposition sub-skills did not show significant improvement. Additionally, the experimental group demonstrated significant improvements to varying degrees in five dimensions of computational thinking self-

    Keywords: Mind mapping, computational thinking skills, self-efficacy, Computational thinking, t-test

    Received: 12 Aug 2024; Accepted: 25 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Guo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Rong Guo, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, China

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