Learning and cognition in the computing science classroom: a study on conceptual understanding for young learners

The main objective of this thesis was to investigate how children acquire and develop conceptual understanding of three fundamental computing concepts during preschool and the first year of primary education. According to grounded cognition theory (Barsalou, 2020), we, as humans, create concepts by transforming our experience with sensory and motor information into mental simulations. In addition, these theories posit that scaffolding learning through action and concrete objects might have an impact on students’ understanding. A recent theoretical contribution specific to the field of computer science education, the EIFFEL model (Kallia and Cutts, 2022) was developed based on grounded cognition theory to support young children’s conceptual understanding. The theoretical framework proposes a sequence of learning that scaffolds children from highly concrete, physical actions and objects towards increasingly abstract paths of abstraction that finalise in formal, symbolic representations and operations we can perform mentally. With the increasing introduction of computing education in mandatory curricula worldwide for young children (Bocconi et al., 2016), it is essential that we, as academics, teachers and practitioners, have empirical, developmental and contextualised data that can account for children’s conceptual understanding and how this changes through time. This thesis comprises five phases of study: in phase 1, I conducted a systematic literature review of action-based and grounded activities in the last two decades, in order to identify relevant experiences in promoting children’s understanding through a grounded cognition perspective. In phase 2, I use design-based research to co-create with a group of teachers a set of activities that incorporate concreteness fading and object-action congruency as early computing activities, based on the theoretical contributions of the EIFFEL model to extend its theory into practice. In phase 3, part A, I employed classroom ethnography to explore the intricacies of the application of the instruction sequence designed in the previous phase in two early childhood classrooms during 10 weeks. This phase of research allowed me to identify a set of behavioural and verbal indicators of conceptual understanding for young learners. Phase 3, part B, I employed a microgenetic and quasi-experimental design in order to empirically test the intervention, using both quantitative and mixed-methods approaches with a special focus on rich longitudinal data across sessions. Last but not least, phase 3, part C of the study, explores teachers’ perspectives and insights on the implementation through qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews.