Effects of cognitive control strategies on coding learning outcomes in early childhood

Abstract

Coding learning involves cognitive control ability that enables children to coordinate behaviors according to internally maintained goals. However, such ability is still developing during early childhood and cannot reach maturity at least until late adolescence. This study aimed to test whether integrating cognitive control strategies into online and offline coding courses could benefit coding learning in early childhood. The results of Study 1 indicated that performance monitoring strategy did not improve coding learning outcome, which might be due to the lack of explicit instruction and social interactions. Then, during the offline coding courses in Study 2, we intentionally taught young children to use planning, monitoring, and reflection strategies based on games and collaboration. The results indicated that these strategies promoted the learning of highly-abstract coding skills. Therefore, the cognitive control strategies that are age-appropriately designed and integrated can exert positive effect on learning coding skills in early childhood.

Keywords:

• Cognitive control strategies
• online/offline coding learning
• planning
• monitoring
• reflection

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the families who participated in this study, as well as the research assistants for helping with data collection.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare they have no conflict of interest related to the research reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 62077042); the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (no. 20YJA190002); Zhejiang University Education Foundation Global Partnership Fund; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.