Computational Thinking Skills of Turkish and Indian Teacher Candidates: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The aim of this study is to compare computational thinking skills of teacher candidates who are educated in Turkey and India. For this purpose, 555 male and 212 female who are students in the Faculty of Education at a University in Turkey and, 239 male and 493 female who are students in Faculty of Education at University of Madras in India. Within the scope of the research, the “computer thinking skill levels scale" developed by Korkmaz, Çakır and Özden (2017) to measure the computer thinking skills of university students in Turkey was used. The scale consists of 29 items and five factors. The Cronbach alpha of Scale’ Turkish form is .822 and, Indian form is .769. Mean, standard deviation, t-test and ANOVA analyses were run on the collected data. According to the results, computational thinking skills of Indian teacher candidates are generally quite high, whereas Turkish teacher candidates are moderately high, and in both groups the students' highest level in term of factors is creativity, and the lowest one is problem-solving skill.