Algorithmic thinking, cooperativity, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving: exploring the relationship between computational thinking skills and academic performance

The continued call for twenty-first century skills renders computational thinking a topical subject of study, as it is increasingly recognized as a fundamental competency for the contemporary world. Yet its relationship to academic performance is poorly understood. In this paper, we explore the association between computational thinking and academic performance. We test a structural model-employing a partial least squares approach-to assess the relationship between computational thinking skills and academic performance. Surprisingly, we find no association between computational thinking skills and academic performance (except for a link between cooperativity and academic performance). These results are discussed respecting curricular mandated instruction in higher-order thinking skills and the importance of curricular alignment between instructional objectives and evaluation approaches for successfully teaching and learning twenty-first-century skills.