| 1. |
- Dagiene, V., et al.
(author)
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Reasoning on children’s cognitive skills in an informatics contest : Findings and discoveries from Finland, Lithuania, and Sweden
- 2014
-
In: Informatics in Schools. Teaching and Learning Perspectives. - Cham : Springer. - 9783319099576 - 9783319099583 ; , s. 66-77
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In this paper, we present the results from a multi-national study of students’ results in the international IT contest “Bebras”. Be-bras provides motivating and game-like tasks in the format of multiple-choice questions and interactive problems to students in grades 2-12. Our study focuses on the results of nearly 8 000 students aged 10-13 in Finland (n=852), Sweden (n=201) and Lithuania (n=7 022), using gender, task and country as the underlying variables. In addition to presenting the overall results of the three student groups, we also analyse a subset of tasks in common according to Bloom's taxonomy and put forward detailed results for these tasks with regard to gender and country. The results show that there is no difference in performance between boys and girls in this age group. Our findings also indicate that there was a slight mismatch between the difficulty level of the tasks used in the contest and students’ actual abilities; finding more efficient and trustworthy ways of evaluating difficulty levels upfront and choosing a suitable task set is hence important for upcoming contests.
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| 2. |
- Dagiene, V., et al.
(author)
-
Reasoning on children’s cognitive skills in an informatics contest: Findings and discoveries from Finland, Lithuania, and Sweden
- 2014
-
In: Informatics in Schools. - Cham : Springer Verlag. - 9783319099576 ; , s. 66-77
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In this paper, we present the results from a multi-national study of students’ results in the international IT contest “Bebras”. Be-bras provides motivating and game-like tasks in the format of multiple-choice questions and interactive problems to students in grades 2-12. Our study focuses on the results of nearly 8 000 students aged 10-13 in Finland (n=852), Sweden (n=201) and Lithuania (n=7 022), using gender, task and country as the underlying variables. In addition to presenting the overall results of the three student groups, we also analyse a subset of tasks in common according to Blooms taxonomy and put forward detailed results for these tasks with regard to gender and country. The results show that there is no difference in performance between boys and girls in this age group. Our findings also indicate that there was a slight mismatch between the difficulty level of the tasks used in the contest and students’ actual abilities; finding more efficient and trustworthy ways of evaluating difficulty levels upfront and choosing a suitable task set is hence important for upcoming contests.
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| 3. |
- Dagiene, V., et al.
(author)
-
Students'performance on programming-related tasks in an informatics contest in Finland, Sweden and Lithuania
- 2014
-
In: ITICSE 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Conference. - New York, New York, USA : ACM Press. - 9781450328333 ; , s. 153-158
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The ways in which informatics is covered in K-12 education vary among European countries. In Finland and Sweden, informatics is not included in the core curriculum, whereas, for example, in Lithuania, all students are exposed to some informatics concepts starting in the fifth grade. Bebras is an annually arranged international informatics contest for K-12 level, resulting in a large collection of data about contestants and their results. In this paper, we analyse contest data from the Finnish, Swedish and Lithuanian 2013 contests, focusing on students'performance on tasks related to algorithmic thinking. Our findings suggest that despite coming from different educational systems, students perform rather similarly on the tasks. The same tasks are difficult and the thinking behind picking an incorrect answer seems rather similar throughout the countries. The analysis also points out that there is a lack of easy questions - this needs to be fixed in order to not risk scaring students away.
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