Learning from the Pasta??The Need for Empirical Evidence on the Transfer Effects of Computer Programming Skills

摘要

In recent years, education has put considerable emphasis on the development of twenty-first century skills—a set of skills that can almost universally be applied to a broad range of domains and problems, and that help students to deal with the challenges and demands of complex, real-world problem situations (Pellegrino and Hilton, 2012). Among others, these skills comprise problem solving, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, adaptability, digital literacy, and computational thinking, and are considered to be critical in our information- and knowledge-rich society (Binkley et al., 2012; Wagner, 2012; Scherer, 2015; Care and Anderson, 2016). Against this background, it has become the designated aim of educators to help students to develop these skills (Kay and Greenhill, 2011). The question of how the development of these skills and the ability to transfer them to different contexts and knowledge domains can be fostered has therefore gained significance (Greiff et al., 2014). Nonetheless, this question is by no means trivial, because the transfer of knowledge and skills does not automatically happen, as Tricot and Sweller (2013) argued.