An Empirical Study Of Teacher Support On Developing Computational Thinking Skills Of Middle School Students

Since 2006,the concept of computational thinking,proposed by Professor Yi-Zhen Zhou,has attracted widespread attention worldwide and has gradually become an important part of the IT curriculum teaching in primary and secondary schools.Several countries have included it in their curriculum standards,and in 2017,China officially included information literacy as one of the core literacies in the high school IT curriculum in the General High School Information Technology Curriculum Standards.Meanwhile,computational thinking ability is a basic ability essential to modern society and one of the important abilities for future work and learning.However,the current teaching conditions and status of China’s secondary school IT curriculum can hardly meet the requirements of IT curriculum standards and the needs of China’s social development,and the current computational thinking ability of junior high school students is generally low,especially in creativity,algorithmic thinking and problem solving ability is poor.Therefore,for the development of computational thinking skills,corresponding teaching measures and tools need to be strengthened.The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of teacher support on the development of computational thinking skills of junior high school students.Through a questionnaire survey of junior high school students from the first to the third year in Wuhan H High School,we analyze the factors that influence students’ computational thinking skills in order to provide a reference for improving the computational thinking skills of junior high school students.This paper investigates the current situation of the connotation and ability development of computational thinking through the literature method,based on the definition of relevant concepts;on this basis,the questionnaire survey method is used to adapt the questionnaire based on the computational thinking scale developed by Korkmaz et al.with the students of Wuhan H High School as the respondents;a random sampling method is used to select 2974 students from the respondents for questionnaire.Statistical analysis and modeling of the questionnaire data were conducted using SPSS 25.0 and AMOS 25.0 software to obtain the current status of computational thinking skills of middle school students and the influence of teacher support on them,and the specific findings are as follows.(1)The overall computational thinking skills of the surveyed junior high school students were at a basic level,and only a small number of students presented above-medium creativity and algorithmic thinking skills.More specifically,according to the results of the assessment of the five dimensions of computational thinking,the three dimensions of problem solving ability,algorithmic thinking,and creativity performed relatively poorly,while they excelled in cooperation and communication skills,and the level of critical thinking was at an intermediate level.Therefore,in future teaching,emphasis should be placed on developing students’ algorithmic thinking and problem solving skills in order to comprehensively promote their computational thinking skills.At the same time,the development of students’ critical thinking skills needs to be strengthened to further improve their overall computational thinking level.(2)After the test of variance,there were significant differences in the effects of different variables on computational thinking skills and its dimensions.Students in different grades and genders showed significant differences in computational thinking skills.Specifically,students in the first and second grades had stronger problem solving skills,and boys had significantly higher levels of algorithmic thinking than girls.In terms of achievement level,the degree to which junior high school students performed better in creativity,algorithmic thinking,cooperation and communication,and critical thinking was correlated with their achievement level being at or above average;in terms of game preference,junior high school students who liked to play online games performed significantly better in algorithmic thinking than junior high school students who disliked playing games very much;in terms of Internet duration,junior high school students who were at 0-2 hours of Internet duration per day performed better in algorithmic In terms of the amount of time spent on the Internet,middle school students who spend 0-2 hours a day on the Internet perform better in algorithmic thinking.(3)The correlation analysis showed that teacher support was significantly and positively related to students’ computational thinking skills.Among them,emotional and social support,autonomy support,and cognitive support significantly affected students’ creativity,algorithmic thinking,cooperation and communication,and critical thinking.Finally,this study explores some feasible strategies and suggestions aimed at promoting the cultivation of computational thinking skills of junior high school students: firstly,the cultivation of creativity and algorithmic thinking of junior high school students should be strengthened in multiple aspects,and students should be guided to actively participate in practice,including programming and engineering practice;secondly,learning resources and tools should be activated to keep students enthusiastic about classroom learning,and attention should be paid to students’ after-school learning he life status;finally,teachers should focus on the cultivation of students’ problem-solving skills,create a positive learning atmosphere,and encourage students to exert their subjective initiative.