The government decided to adopt software education for elementary, middle, and high schools across the country beginning 2018, in order to cultivate creative software human resources necessary for coming ‘Software Oriented Society (SOS).’ Prior to...
The government decided to adopt software education for elementary, middle, and high schools across the country beginning 2018, in order to cultivate creative software human resources necessary for coming ‘Software Oriented Society (SOS).’ Prior to overall execution of software education in 2018, Software Research Schools and Software Leading Schools were assigned and began operation in 2015 to identify problems and improvements in development of appropriate organization and operation model for software education course and its operations. Although private institutions have implemented various software educations for elementary and middle school students since 2013, verification of the effect of these software educations on students’ logical thinking and creative problem solving skills were insufficient.
Hence, this study verified the effects on logical thinking and creative problem solving skills of 5th grade students at elementary school, by applying three different software education programs with a different administrator for each program.
This study was conducted with 23 students from a 5th-grade class of Software Research School in Gyeonggi-do, 18 students from a 5th-grade class of Software Leading School assigned by Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, and 25 students of a5th-grade class of a regular elementary school which adopted “Let’s Play Software’ program of Naver, aprivate institution, for club activities. ‘Modification Proposal of GALT Questionnaire for Measurement of Logical Thinking Abilities of Elementary School Students’ revised by Kyu Seung Chung(1998) based on GALT(Group Assessment of Logical Thinking)by Roadranka, Yeana, and Palilla at Georgia University in the US was revised and used for ex ante and expost test. For measurement of creative problem solving skills, questionnaire developed in 2004 by MI team of Psychology Laboratory at Seoul National University was extracted and used for ex ante and ex post questionnaire, based on ‘Development Research I of Simple Creative Problem Solving Skills Test(Chief of Research, Seok Hee Cho)’ published in 2001 by Korea Education Development Institute.
The findings of this research are as follows:
First, the findings, from the test of logical thinking abilities of learners after application of different software education programs for each class group, indicated increased logical thinking abilities for all three groups. With regards to the level of improvements in subareas of logical thinking abilities, the findings indicated that software education was effective in all three groups for improvements in correlative and combinational logic, with improvements in proportional logic only at regular school, controlling variables logic only at research school, and probabilistic logic only at leading school, and not effective in conservation logic at all three groups.
Second, the findings, from the test of creative problem solving skills of learners after application of different software education programs for each class group, indicated increased creative problem solving skills for all three groups. With regards to the level of improvements in subareas of creative problem solving skills, the findings indicated that software education was effective in all three groups for improvements in divergent thinking ability, with the remaining three sub-factors showing improvements in two groups at least. This indicated that software education has relatively even effect on creative problem solving skills regardless of specific sub-factors.
The study has implications that software education provides improvements in logical thinking abilities and creative problem solving skills of students even with different administrators of operation.