ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Enhancing Computational Thinking through Coding Education in Primary School Students (Ages 8-12): An Experimental Study on the Impact of Early Programming Exposure on Problem-Solving Skills
Provisionally accepted
- 1School of computer Science and Technology, China University of Mining and Technology (CUMT), xuzhou, China
- 2Institute of Education/Center for Teaching and Learning Development, XIAMEN UNIVERSITY CHINA, xiamen, China
- 3College of Statistics and Data Science, Xinjiang university of Finance & Economics, Xinjiang, China
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This research paper is an empirical investigation of the effectiveness of early coding instruction in improving the problem-solving skills and computational thinking (CT) in primary school students. The main research question was to establish whether structured 6-month coding intervention gains cognitive abilities of the children at age 8-12 more than an intervention of no coding does. The study was based on a quasi-experimental pre-test/ post-test design with 200 students grouped randomly into an experimental group (n=100) and a control group (n=100). The experimental group engaged in a 24-week curriculum on Scratch and Python, and the control group had used the standard curriculum. To measure the effects of skill acquisition and intensity of practice, paired sample t-tests, independent sample t-tests, and Pearson correlation analysis were used to analyze data. Findings suggest statistically significant effects on the experimental group with problem-solving scores increasing to 23.5 (mean of 17.8) (p < 0.001) and computational thinking scores increasing to 30.6 (mean of 20.4) (p < 0.001), which are large effect sizes. Conversely, the control group registered insignificant gains. Theoretically, the study adds to the field by showing that the stage of concrete operational stage (ages 7-11) is a very important developmental stage in abstract algorithmic thinking development in the form of programming. In practice, the results give evidence-based support to the idea of implementing coding in the primary education program as a professional competency, but as a cognitive development opportunity that is crucial to the digital literacy of the 21st century.
Keywords: Computational thinking, Early Coding Exposure, Educational intervention, Problemsolving skills, Scratch
Received: 28 Oct 2025; Accepted: 26 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Wang, Wan and Dai. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: JiaMin Dai
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