An Examination of the Effects of Information Technology Course on Computational Thinking Skills and Technology-Mediated Learning

The study aimed to determine the effect of the information technologies course on students' computational thinking skills and technology-mediated learning process. The study was conducted on 237 first-year students of the Faculty of Education who were enrolled in the information technology course, and a one-group pretest-posttest design was used. Dependent t-test, independent t-test, and correlation analysis were used to analyze the data. In the results obtained from the study, it was found that the information technologies course did not make a significant difference on the students' computational thinking skills, while it made a significant difference on the effect of technology-mediated learning on the learning process. When the effect of the information technologies course on computational thinking skills and technology-mediated learning process in terms of gender factor was considered as pre-test and post-test, there was a significant difference in favor of male students in terms of computational thinking skills and technology-mediated learning process within the scope of pre-test data, while there was no significant difference within the scope of post-test data. The study also showed that there was a positive and moderate relationship between students' computational thinking skills and their attitudes toward the technology-mediated learning process. In the context of this finding, it can be stated that technology-enhanced learning environments can have a positive effect on the development of computational thinking skills, and that lessons delivered in such learning environments can contribute to the development of students' creativity, algorithmic thinking, critical thinking, problem solving and collaborative working skills.