The bidirectional predictions between primary school students' STEM and language academic achievements and computational thinking: The moderating role of gender

In the era of artificial intelligence, computational thinking (CT) has become a key skill that digital citizens should possess in the 21st century. There has already been a popular research trend to integrate CT into school curriculum, especially in the STEM field. However, there are still limited large scale research studies on the bidirectional relationships between primary schoolers' STEM academic achievement and CT skills, and so is language academic achievement, especially with the longitudinal research methods. This study adopted correlation analysis and cross-lagged regression analysis in a longitudinal study to separately explore the bidirectional predictive effect of STEM academic achievement, language academic achievement, and CT skills of 1,487 Chinese primary school students in grades 4-6 (11-12 years old), and explored the moderating role of gender. The results showed that there were significant bidirectional predictions between students' STEM and language academic achievements and CT skills, which further confirmed the feasibility and advantages of integrating CT in STEM and language subjects. In addition, gender only played a moderating role in the predictions of students' CT skills on their language academic achievement. Implications for reducing the gender differences in STEM and CT fields are also discussed. The research results will provide references to integrating CT into the curriculum of basic education and improving the development of primary school students' CT skills and promoting STEM teaching practice.