Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Barton, Michelle

Area of Concentration

Psychology

Abstract

While previous literature has examined relations between executive function, academic ability and bilingualism, the relationship between executive function, bilingualism and programming ability has not been studied. To this end, this studied examined how bilingual and monolingual children performed on executive function measures of inhibition/cognitive flexibility and learned basic programming in ScratchJr, a developmentally appropriate programming language for children ages 5-7 developed for touchscreen tablets. Children from a local Montessori school participated in 2 sessions to complete executive function measures and learn how to use ScratchJr before completing an assessment consisting of debugging and code writing tasks. Results found that older children, bilinguals, and female students performed better on the ScratchJr programming tasks than younger children, monolinguals and male students, respectively. In addition, performance on executive function measures was not related to ScratchJr programming ability. In addition, all of the children demonstrated proficiency in a number of broad programming skills. Overall, the findings support continuing research on the relationships between bilingualism, executive function, and programming ability, especially considering their relevance to issues in education such as gender stereotypes in STEM fields and performance gaps for students who learned English as a second language.

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