A study of primary school students' interest, collaboration attitude, and programming empowerment in computational thinking education

Building on Seymour Papert's view of empowering students by mastering programming, this study conceptualized programming empowerment as consisting of four components: meaningfulness, impact, creative self-efficacy, and programming self-efficacy. A sample of 287 primary school students in grades four to six completed a corresponding survey. Confirmatory factor analysis validated the proposed components of the programming empowerment instrument. A structural equation model indicated that students with greater interest in programming perceived it as more meaningful, had greater impact, had greater creative self-efficacy, and had greater programming self-efficacy. Also, students with attitudes toward collaboration that were more positive than others had greater creative self-efficacy. Boys showed more interest in programming than girls did. Students in higher grade levels than others viewed programming as less meaningful and had lower programming self-efficacy. These results support future studies that evaluate the impacts of interest-driven computational thinking and programming curricula with ample collaboration opportunities.