Abstract:

Our rapidly evolving digital world presents new challenges in education. The general requirement of the labour market is that graduates should have skills that meet the employers' expectations. In the next five years, problem solving will be one of the main characteristics of an ideal employee. In our study, we examined computational thinking within problem solving. The aim of our research was to assess the degree to which students in university education had acquired the ability to use computational thinking at school, and to show the relationship between their level of literacy and algorithmic thinking. In this study we compare students’ level of text comprehension from engineering and humanities departments, we analyse the relationships between the operations of text interpretation and algorithmic thinking, and examine the role of problem solving ability in complex tasks. In the tasks where students not only had to retrieve information from the given text, but also had to recognize the interrelationships between parts of the text and reflect on its content, the achieved averages were low. Students who had the opportunity to acquire an algorithmic approach and thinking in high school performed above average on all assignments. This suggests that more attention should be paid to the opinion of those professionals who suggest that computational thinking should be developed to the level of writing, reading comprehension and mathematics.

Keywords:

Problem solving, algorithmic thinking, computational thinking, reading and comprehension skills, levels of thinking.