UMass Amherst, 12 Nov. 2022

Teaching Computational Thinking to Students with Learning Differences

Computational thinking (CT)—abstraction, decomposition, pattern recognition, algorithmic thinking, and debugging—is at the core of programming. CT is challenging for all students, but especially for those with learning differences. Considering the cognitive demands associated with various computational thinking tasks (at whatever age/grade level), alongside students’ particular strengths and weaknesses, allows us to make targeted adjustments to our pedagogy that will benefit all students.

Learning Objective: Consider pedagogy and access from a cognitive perspective, and gain tools for teaching students with various learning styles, including those with learning differences.

Presenter: Emmett Wald (they/them)

The Session Handout goes into detail about everything we covered in the session.

• What is computational thinking?
• Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory of cognitive abilities
• “Learning differences” defined
• Instructional strategies

View the “CHC Cognitive Abilities and Learning Differences in CS” table on its own. You can access PDFs of the Task Analysis Worksheet and the Student Analysis Worksheet.

For more on this topic, the research paper I wrote that inspired this session: “Instructional Strategies for Teaching Computational Thinking to K-12 Students with Learning Differences” (2021).