Abstract
This chapter investigates how educational software can affect critical thinking skills in primary education. To this end, we present a study which aimed to examine the impact of digital material for teaching Informatics in Primary Education considering exploratory, constructive and collaborative teaching approaches with the aim of acquiring problem solving skills and to develop a critical thinking. Subsequently two groups of students, an experimental (EG) and a control one (CG), used the material that was developed. In the EG the Scratch educational programming environment supported the teaching, while in the CG teaching was not supported by ICT. The main goal of the study was to assess the learning outcomes in the two conditions. These learning outcomes were knowledge and skills evaluated according to the levels of critical thinking skills. There was observed greater cooperativeness and teamwork among students in the CG relative to the EG. On the other hand, skills of error correction were higher in the EG possibly as a result of the feedback obtained from Scratch. For this reason, it is suggested that an ideal learning scenario would combine experiential stimuli with the immediate and individualised feedback that interactive educational software can provide.
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Halki, P., Politis, P. (2014). Teaching Informatics in Primary School With and Without Educational Software Support. In: Karagiannidis, C., Politis, P., Karasavvidis, I. (eds) Research on e-Learning and ICT in Education. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6501-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6501-0_6
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