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

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. It is well-known that gender is an important factor in programming education (Noh & Lee, 2019), as boys are traditionally more familiar with computers and have therefore a better attitude towards them. Girls are thus a category of students considered to be underrepresented, and policies aiming at developing CT in primary school promote gender equity (National Academy of Sciences et al., 2007), implying this topic to be addressed by research. Inourreview,weselectedjournalarticlesandproceedingspapers,in10well-knowndatabases,from2006to2022, with the following inclusion criteria: explicit reference to CT in title and/or abstract and/or keywords; english language; thetypicalformofascientificfullpaper;focusonCTinK-5school;asoundmethodology,withatleastapreand post- assessment and at least one assessment tool of CT, valid and reliable to some extent, which considers CT asathoughtprocess(i.e.notonlyasanacquisitionofComputerScienceknowledge).31studiesmetthosecriteria. Among them, 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 differenceofCTdevelopmentbetweengirlsandboys.Nonetheless,wecanfindsomeinterestinginformationabout this topic: for instance, Wei et al. (2021), show significant differences when pairing boys and girls in pair-programming activities; Angeli & Valanides (2020) show that boys and girls in Kindergarten prefer a different scaffolding technique in Educational Robotics activities; Del Olmo-Munoz et al. (2020), found that unplugged activities benefit girls in terms of motivation. 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.