Abstract:

Integration of visual programming in early formal education has been found to promote computational thinking, which is necessary for success in the knowledge society (Voogt et al., 2015). According to the constructionist learning approach (Papert, 1980), it is important to teach visual programming in order to promote learning and improve high-order thinking processes (Kafai, 2016). However, teacher's intuitive perspective about optimal learning processes – "folk psychology" impacts their perspectives about teaching – "folk pedagogy" (Olson & Bruner, 1996) and plays significant role in integrating educational technologies, such as visual programming, within the formal curriculum (Blau, Shamir-Inbal & Kesler, 2018). For instance, the instructivist perspective will result in teacher-centered pedagogy, even in technology-enhanced environments (Peled et al., 2015). In contrast, the constructivist perspective will result in student-centered pedagogy, based on independent learner experience with teacher guidance (Olson & Bruner, 1996).

The current study first administrated an online "folk pedagogy" questionnaire (Blau & Pieterse, 2015), in order to characterize pedagogical perceptions of 89 teachers, who integrate technologies in their classroom, as either instructivist of constructivist. Following that, we focused on 24 of these teachers, who teach code in a visual programming environment – Scratch (Resnick& Rosenbaum, 2013). Among the participants, 14 were holding constructivist and 10 - instructivist pedagogical perspectives. The coding of the interviews showed that pedagogical perspectives of the teachers are reflected in their teaching and assessment strategies in the visual programming environment.

The amount of constructivist teaching strategies by teachers holding constructivist pedagogical perspectives (75.9%) was significantly higher than among their instructivist colleagues (46.1%, p<.001). However, it was found that the very act of teaching in the visual programming environment encourages constructivist pedagogy even among teachers holding an instructivist perspective. Based on the finding, we recommended integrating visual programming in schools for promoting constructivist pedagogy. The lecture will discuss the implication of the findings for educational theory and practice.

Keywords:

Visual programming, computational thinking, folk psychology and folk pedagogy.