| Popis: |
Teaching is key to maintenance and development of human culture. Surprisingly, it has been much less studied by neuroscience and cognitive science than learning, its counterpart. Here, we propose that teaching among companions of equal status, or peer tutoring, may help children understand and learn programming languages and their fundamentals.In this study we compared i) learning in a regular class set-up, with one adult teacher and a group of children, vs ii) peer tutoring, with one child teaching another of the same age. In addition, we hypothesized that revision and reorganization of knowledge, supposedly involved in teaching, will have an impact on tutor performance as well.To our knowledge, this is the first systematic and quantifiable study pertaining peer tutoring and learning of programming skills in children. Our results have shown that children perform equally well, irrespective of whether they learned from an adult or from a peer. In addition, ongoing further analysis may inform about subtler differences between both conditions, and also about possible tutor benefits not present in children who did not go through the hypothetically enriching experience of teaching. |
