CULTURALLY GROUNDED UNPLUGGED COMPUTER SCIENCE INSTRUCTION AND COMPUTATIONAL THINKING DEVELOPMENT: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY FROM UZBEKISTAN
Keywords:
unplugged computer science; computational thinking; culturally responsive pedagogy; informatics education; quasi-experimental design; Uzbekistan; secondary educationAbstract
Informatics education in low-resource settings often struggles to develop computational thinking (CT) when computer laboratories, stable electricity, and trained teachers are scarce. Unplugged computer science, which teaches computing concepts through physical and narrative activities rather than digital devices, has been proposed as a resource-independent alternative, and culturally responsive pedagogy has separately been shown to strengthen engagement and retention. This study combined both approaches by designing and testing an unplugged instructional model grounded in Uzbek cultural artefacts (ornament and suzani patterns, folk riddles, traditional games, and procedural crafts) for lower-secondary informatics classrooms. A quasi-experimental pre-test/post-test design was used with two intact classes (N = 60; experimental n = 30, control n = 30) taught by the same teacher over a six-to-eight-week intervention. CT was measured across five dimensions—abstraction, decomposition, pattern recognition, sequencing, and algorithmic reasoning—using a 25-item instrument adapted from the Computational Thinking Test. The experimental group's mean score rose from 11.87 to 20.43 (gain = 8.56), compared with 11.53 to 15.97 (gain = 4.44) in the control group. An independent-samples t-test confirmed a statistically significant post-test difference (t = 7.98, p < .001), and normalized gain scores favoured the experimental group (0.65 versus 0.33). Student perception data and classroom observations corroborated the quantitative gains, showing high enjoyment and engagement, with algorithmic reasoning the most demanding dimension for both groups. The findings suggest that culturally grounded unplugged instruction is a practical, low-cost strategy for strengthening computational thinking in infrastructure-constrained contexts, with implications for teacher training and curriculum design in Uzbekistan and comparable settings.References
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