Effective Instructional Strategies for the Development of Computational Thinking in Primary Education: A Systematic Literature Review

This study consists of a 17-year (2006-2021) systematic literature review on the effective instructional strategies for developing Computational Thinking (CT) in primary school students (K-5). The aim of this paper is to identify instructional strategies that have been implemented and evaluated by means of a pre- and post-test, with the aim of developing CT as a thinking process (i.e. going beyond the mere acquisition of CS concepts). The analysis considers the overall pedagogical approach, with the intention of overcoming both the archetypal approaches to coding and the assessment tools used to measure CT acquisition.