Evaluating the Effectiveness of Explicit Instruction in Reducing Program Reasoning Fallacies in Elementary Level Students

Previous research in K-5 CS education has focused on improving students' engagement in programming using visual block-based environments like Scratch. However, little is known about how elementary school students' reason about programs. We define computational reasoning as the ability to read, write, trace and debug programs and predict program behavior. Recently, computing education researchers have become interested in exploring how elementary school students build their computational reasoning abilities. This poster presents results from a study which analyzed the role of explicit instruction in the form of 'laws of computation' in cultivating elementary school (4th and 5th graders) students' ability to reason about programs using Microsoft Kodu Game Lab. We used pretests to record students' default models of reasoning about programs and then used posttests to measure the effectiveness of intervention by noting students' reasoning responses on a similar program. Our findings indicate that by default students reason sequentially about program execution which can be incorrect in situations like parallel rule execution. We also found that the use of explicit instruction in the form of 'laws' is helpful for students to refine their understanding of program execution and to improve their reasoning ability.