PERFORMANCE OF JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS’ COMPUTATIONAL THINKING IN MATHEMATICAL PROCESS

This study explores the performance of junior high school students in computational thinking within mathematical tasks, which were systematically designed based on 4 computational thinking elements and 3 PISA mathematical processes. We employed inductive analysis to explore types of responses from 60 junior high school students, with 30 students from each of the 7th and 9th grades. The results showed that students performed well in decomposition and pattern recognition, but performed relatively weaker in abstraction. Their algorithm designs could be classified into three major types: graph-oriented, direct code-oriented, and pattern code-oriented. The 9th-graders outperformed 7th-graders in algorithmic design. As long as students could design algorithms for simple cases, they had no difficulty with more complex cases.