EXPLORING EARLY CHILDHOOD CHILDREN’S COMPUTATIONAL THINKING SKILLS

Year 2023, Volume: 7 Issue: 1, 37 - 57, 07.12.2022

Nazlı Ülker Hançer Ayşe Çiftçi Mustafa Sami Topçu

Abstract

The current study has two purposes and within the context of the first purpose, the TechCheck-K (Relkin & Bers, 2021) instrument, which was developed to evaluate the computational thinking (CT) skills of children at the kindergarten level, was adapted into Turkish. Within the context of the second purpose of the study, the extent to which CT skill levels of Turkish children vary depending on the variables of gender and pre-school education status was investigated. To this end, the study employed the survey model, one of the quantitative methods. The study group is comprised of 106 early childhood children. As a result of the data analyses carried out in the study, the mean item difficulty index of the TechCheck-K instrument, which was adapted to Turkish in the study, was found to be 0.49 and the mean item discrimination index was found to be 0.32. The mean CT skill score of the children was found to be X ̅=7.42 out of 15 points. In addition, no significant difference was found between girls and boys and between the children who received and those who did not receive pre-school education in terms of CT skill level.

Keywords

Computational thinking skills, early childhood children, instrument adaptation, TechCheck-K

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