Peer tutoring of computer programming increases exploratory behavior in children

DE LA HERA, DIEGO P.; ZANONI, MARÍA B.; SIGMAN, MARIANO; CALERO, CECILIA I.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Elsevier

Año: 2022 vol. 216

0022-0965

There is growing interest in teaching computer science and programming skills in schools. Here we investigated the efficacy of peer tutoring, which is known to be a useful educational resource in other domains but never before has been examined in such a core aspect of applied logical thinking in children. We compared (a) how children (N = 42, age range = 7 years 1 month to 8 years 4 months) learn computer programming from an adult versus learning from a peer and (b) the effect of teaching a peer versus simply revising what has been learned. Our results indicate that children taught by a peer showed comparable overall performance?a combination of accuracy and response times?to their classmates taught by an adult. However, there was a speed?accuracy trade-off, and peer-taught children showed more exploratory behavior, with shorter response times at the expense of lower accuracy. In contrast, no tutor effects (i.e., resulting from teaching a peer) were found. Thus, our results provide empirical evidence in support of peer tutoring as a way to help teach computer programming to children. This could contribute to the promotion of a widespread understanding of how computers operate and how to shape them, which is essential to our values of democracy, plurality, and freedom.