Promoting elementary school students’ programming learning: Effects of metacognitive vs. cognitive scaffolding

Abstract

Programming is an indispensable ability in the current era of artificial intelligence. It has become a topic of interest for educators and researchers to explore the effective instructional strategies to improve students’ programming knowledge and skills. Cognitive and metacognitive scaffolding have proven to have the potential to facilitate programming performance. However, their comparative effects on programming performance have received scant attention. To fill this research gap, the current study aimed to explore how cognitive and metacognitive scaffolding influence elementary school students’ Scratch programming knowledge and skills in an information technology course based on a quasi-experimental design. Three intact classes, including 126 fifth graders, were randomly assigned to a control group and two experimental groups: a cognitive scaffolding and a metacognitive scaffolding group. The findings indicated that the metacognitive scaffolding group showed significantly better scores in programming knowledge and skills than the non-scaffolding group. However, no significant differences were found between the metacognitive and cognitive scaffolding groups, or between the cognitive scaffolding and non-scaffolding groups. This study provides implications for the design and development of scaffolding based on Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive and metacognitive mediation, and also contributes to our comprehension of how scaffolding types influence students’ programming knowledge and skills.

Keywords:

• Cognitive scaffolding
• metacognitive scaffolding
• programming knowledge
• programming skills

Ethical approval

The experiment was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Chonnam National University.

Authors’ contributions

All authors contributed to the study’s conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were conducted by Yi-Pin Huang and Yingying Pan. The original draft of the manuscript was written by Yi-Pin Huang and all the authors reviewed and edited the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yi-Pin Huang

Yi-Pin Huang is an assistant professor at the Department of Educational Technology, Wenzhou University, China. Her research interests include computer programming, instructional design, and technology-enhanced learning environment.

Hoisoo Kim

Hoisoo Kim is a professor at the College of Education, Chonnam National University, South Korea. His research interests include cognitive science and cultural-historical activity theory.

Yingying Pan

Yingying Pan is an assistant professor at the Department of Educational Technology, Wenzhou University, China. Her research interests include learning science, metacognition, and human-computer interaction.

Xiao-Li Zheng

Xiao-Li Zheng is an associate professor at the Department of Educational Technology, Wenzhou University, China. Her research interests include collaborative argumentation, social metacognition, flipped learning, self-regulated learning, application of activity theory and actor network theory into education, STEM and computational thinking.

Yun-Fang Tu

Yun-Fang Tu is an associate professor at the Department of Educational Technology, Wenzhou University, China. Her research interests include information literacy, digital library, online learning, mobile and ubiquitous learning.