Abstract:

In today’s knowledge and information age there is a high labour demand for individuals who have the necessary expertise in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) areas. However, numerous international research studies have indicated that the average performance of students in Slovakia and Hungary has been consistently below the average of the OECD countries over the last 10 years. One of the main research objectives of a larger project at the J. Selye University was to identify the reasons of Slovak and Hungarian secondary school students’ low interest in STEM subjects. The project studied the students’ natural-scientific, mathematical, algorithmic and problem-solving thinking, understanding difficulties, and their learning styles and attitudes towards STEM sciences, including computer science. The study sample (n = 1517) consisted of secondary school students from one Hungarian county (Komárom-Esztergom megye), one Slovak region (Nitriansky kraj) and southern Slovakia where the Hungarian minority lives as a regional majority. The research instrument (STEM assessment test) was developed with a total of 20 tasks, 4-4 tasks were chosen from school subjects of informatics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics. The reliability of this instrument was tested by conducting a pilot study on a small sample (n = 129) of students both from Hungary and Slovakia. After the evaluation of the pilot study, we revised the computer science tasks and made changes in the wording of their text. In this paper some results, analyses and conclusions of the main empirical study are presented, focusing particularly on evaluation of students’ responses to the computer science tasks by considering the solution times.

Keywords:

STEM, STEM education, algorithmic thinking, computer science education, secondary education.