The Development And Evaluation Of STEM Courses Based On The Cultivation Of Computational Thinking

As technologies such as cloud computing,big data and artificial intelligence emerge,computational thinking will play an important role.Computational thinking,as a new concept in the field of computer science,is developing towards universality and is considered as an ability as important as reading,writing and arithmetic.Western developed countries have integrated computational thinking into basic education,and China has included computational thinking as one of the core qualities in the information technology curriculum of primary and secondary schools.Therefore,the research on the development and evaluation of STEM courses based on the cultivation of computational thinking is of profound era significance.This study mainly focuses on three questions: first,what is computational thinking?Second,how to construct STEM courses based on the cultivation of computational thinking?Third,how to verify the effectiveness of the course in cultivating students' computational thinking.In view of the above problems,this paper first uses the literature research method in the theoretical research section to sort out the research context of computational thinking and summarize the essential connotation of computational thinking.Secondly,with reference to the international cutting-edge curriculum development concepts,by integrating computational thinking with STEM education concepts,a STEM curriculum based on the cultivation of computational thinking was constructed,and the curriculum was designed iteratively with the method of educational design and research.Finally,a curriculum case meeting the learning needs of junior high school students was presented.Then,in the part of curriculum evaluation design,this paper drew lessons from the design principle of the exam questions of the international computational thinking challenge(Bebras)and the relevant theories of the international educational technology association on computational thinking,and designed the computational thinking situation test questions,computational thinking attitude scale and interview outline.The computational thinking situation test is divided into five dimensions:abstraction,decomposition,algorithm,pattern recognition and evaluation,and the computational thinking attitude scale is divided into four dimensions: confidence in dealing with complexity,persistence in working with difficult problems,tolerance for ambiguity and the ability to communicate and work with others to achieve a common goal or solution.The interview part is mainly based on quantitative research and carries out qualitative research on students' learning experience to support the results of quantitative data.Finally,in the part of data collection and analysis of research results,this paper used quasi-experimental research method to select four natural classes in grade one of a middle school in Suzhou for experiment,among which two classes were the experimental group and the other two classes were the control group.In the quantitative analysis part,the test method was used to collect research data,and the data were analyzed by Excel and SPSS software.The results showed that the average difficulty value and the degree of differentiation were 0.57 and 0.41,respectively.The coefficient of Alpha and KMO were 0.839 and 0.831 respectively,and the Bartlett sphericity test was p<0.001,indicating a good reliability and validity of the scale.In the part of qualitative analysis,the interview results verify the research results of quantitative data.This study drew the following conclusions: STEM courses based on the cultivation of computational thinking promoted the development of students' computational thinking.Students in the experimental group showed significantly higher level of computational thinking test than those in the control group,especially in the dimensions of abstraction,algorithm,pattern recognition and evaluation.At the same time,the computational thinking attitude scale and the interview results reveal the close relationship between computational thinking and students' attitude from the dimensions of emotional attitude and values.To sum up,a series of results have proved the scientificity and effectiveness of curriculum development and evaluation design.This study will provide some references for the development and evaluation research of computational thinking curriculum in junior high school.