Type of Publication: Article in Collected Edition

Measuring Learners’ Interest in Computing (Education): Development of an Instrument and First Results

Author(s):

Brinda, T.; Tobinski, D.; Schwinem, S.

Editor:

Tatnall, A.; Webb, M.

Title of Anthology:

Tomorrow's Learning: Involving Everyone. Learning with and about Technologies and Computing 11th IFIP TC 3 World Conference on Computers in Education, WCCE 2017, Dublin, Ireland, July 3-6, 2017, Revised Selected Papers

pages:

484-493

Publisher:

Springer

Location(s):

Cham, Switzerland

Publication Date:

2018

ISBN:

978-3-319-74309-7

Language:

English

Keywords:

Learners’ interest, computing interest, secondary education, questionnaire, empirical study, explorative study

Digital Object Identifier (DOI):

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-74310-3_49

Link to complete version:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-74310-3_49

Citation:

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Abstract

So far, there is hardly any empirical research on the question of what raises or influences the interest of school learners in computer science or computing education. Aspects to be considered are for example pedagogical decisions of the teacher concerning contexts, phenomena, situations, or concepts to which a lesson or a lesson sequence refers, planned learner activities and many others. This paper analyses a model for describing interest in physics on its transferability to computer science, reports about the development of an online questionnaire for investigating the computing-related interests of school learners and gives results of a first empirical pilot study (based on N=141 datasets). Based on the participants’ answers concerning socio-demographical aspects, the computing interest of different groups of learners was analysed. A higher level of computing interest was found at male pupils, learners who indicated that they were striving for a computing-related job, that computing was their favourite school subject, or that they had good or very good school marks in mathematics or computing.