Abstract:

School informatics is a relatively new subject compared to mathematics. So far, there is no common international agreement on the adopted framework for teaching informatics and information technology in general education in OECD countries. Lack of research in this area makes it difficult to identify methods, forms and contents that are effective in teaching informatics at all school levels.

Therefore, in article, we will deal with the issue of teaching informatics at universities in the context of competences acquired by students in this field during secondary education. We analyse the study results from the subject Informatics 1 of the first year´s students of faculty at the University of Žilina.

In the first part of the article, we analyse the current state of informatics education at secondary schools - current state of education of informatics.

In the second part, we present the results of a pedagogical experiment, the aim of which is to explore the effectiveness of teaching informatics at universities in connection with the knowledge acquired by students in secondary schools.

The experiences gained during the exercises and lectures at the faculty led us to make research.
One of the problems is the knowledge level of students coming from different secondary schools. Students from different types of schools have: different quality of knowledges and unequal learning habits with the various ability to learn new themes and responsibly prepare for the exam.

We have observed that the type of secondary school influences the study results.
Another interesting fact is that students who had a lot of informatics in secondary school do not achieve better results than those who have much less.

For our research, we divided secondary schools into three categories: Gymnasium, Business Academy, Secondary vocational school.
We have identified the following research issues:
Whether and to what extent can the study results of 1st year students from the subject Informatics1 be influenced by the type of secondary school from which students come to us?
To verify we used the sample of 300 students and the calculation of the average grade from an IT exam suggests that a type of secondary school affects students results at university:
Average mark in the exam in Informatics1 of Gymnasium students was 3,11224, Business Academy 3,69474 and of Secondary vocational school 3,9596.

To verify this assumption, we used the one-factor variance analysis method for an unbalanced model.
Then we were also interested in whether students with a higher number of lessons in computer science than two hours (group1) a week in a secondary school achieved better results in the exam in Informatics1 than students whose hourly subsidy was equal or less than 2 hours a week (group2).

The study results pointed out that it does not affect the learning outcomes, as shown by the average grades of both student groups:
Average mark in the exam in Informatics1 of group1 was 3,5686, of group2 3,676.
To evaluate the hypothesis statistically we used t-Test for Two-Sample Assuming Unequal Variances.
We have obtained the following results:
The type of secondary school influences the ability of students to be successful in completing the subject Informatics1 in the first year of university studies.

The one-hour subsidy of the subject Informatics at secondary school does not affect the achieved results of the exam in the Informatics course at the PEDAS faculty.

Keywords:

Informatic´s education, pedagogical research, hypothesis verifications, one-factor variance analysis method, t-Test for Two-Sample Assuming Unequal Variances.