Ensuring gender equity in promoting Computational Thinking in Primary School. A systematic review

This paper is part of a wider review about the effective pedagogical strategies aiming at developing Computational Thinking (CT) in primary school (K-5). Within this research, we focus here on those studies who specifically focus, directly or indirectly, on gender equity. Its relevance is based on the awareness that Computer Science is stereotyped as a maleoriented field right from the earliest school grades. In our review, we selected journal articles and proceedings papers, in 10 well-known databases, from 2006 to 2022, with specific inclusion criteria: Among the 31 studies that met those criteria, 12 papers dealt with gender equity to some extent: 7 of them mentionned “gender”, “girls”, “equity” either in the title or in the keywords, the other adopted the gender difference among the criteria of analysis. As a general result, all the papers, although proposing different pedagogical approaches, don’t detect a significant difference of CT development between girls and boys. Nonetheless, we can find some interesting information related, for instance, to group composition or to the scaffolding type. These results can give further directions to research and educational practices on how to properly structure educational activities aiming to develop CT in primay school able to promote gender equity.