Does computational thinking correlate with personality? The non-cognitive side of computational thinking Marcos Román-González Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) Facultad de Educación, C/ Juan del Rosal, nº 14, 28040, Madrid (Spain) Tel.: +34 91 398 90 37 mroman@edu.uned.es Juan-Carlos Pérez-González Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) Facultad de Educación, C/ Juan del Rosal, nº 14, 28040, Madrid (Spain) Tel.: +34 91 398 69 55 jcperez@edu.uned.es Gregorio Robles Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC) ETSI Telecomunicac., Departamental III, Camino del Molino s/n, 28943 Fuenlabrada (Madrid, Spain) Tel.: +34 91 488 87 50 grex@gsyc.urjc.es Jesús Moreno-León Programamos.es & URJC ETSI Telecomunicac., Departamental III, Camino del Molino s/n, 28943 Fuenlabrada (Madrid, Spain) Tel.: +34 91 488 87 50 jesus.moreno@programamos.es ABSTRACT Computational thinking (CT) is being considered as a key set of problem-solving skills to be acquired by the new generations of digital citizens and workers in order to thrive in a computer-based world. However, from a psychometric point of view, CT is still a poorly defined psychological construct: there is no full consensus on a formal definition of CT or how to measure it; and its correlations with other psychological constructs, whether cognitive or non-cognitive, have not been completely established. In response to the latter, this paper aims to study specifically the correlations between CT and the several dimensions from the ‘Big Five’ model of human personality: Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. To do so, the Computational Thinking Test (CTt) and the Big Five Questionnaire-Children version (BFQ-C) are administered on a sample (n = 99) of Spanish students from 5th to 10th grade. Results show statistically significant correlations between CT and: Openness to Experience (r = 0.41), Extraversion (r = 0.30), and Conscientiousness (r = 0.27). These results are partially consistent with the literature about the links between cognitive and personality variables, and corroborate the existence of a non- cognitive side of CT. Hence, educational interventions aimed at fostering CT should take into account these non-cognitive issues in order to be comprehensive and successful. CCS Concepts • Social and professional topics➝ Computational thinking • Social and professional topics➝ K-12 education Keywords Computational thinking; Personality; Computational Thinking Test; Big Five model; Assessment; Educational psychology. 1. INTRODUCTION Our digital society is full of objects driven by software [20]. We are living, more and more, embedded in a computer-based world. Given this current reality, it is becoming indispensable to handle the language of computers to participate fully and effectively in the digital ecosystem that surrounds us. So it is not surprising that the term ‘code-literacy’ has been recently coined to define the process of teaching and learning to read-write with computer programming languages [24, 31, 32]. Thus, we consider that a person is code-literate when he/she is able to read and write in the language of computers, and to think computationally [26]. If code-literacy refers ultimately to an emerging read-write practice, computational thinking (CT) refers to the underlying problem- solving (only cognitive?) process that supports it. In other words, computer programming is the fundamental way that enables CT to come alive [19], although CT can be projected on different kinds of problems that may not involve directly programming tasks [35]. 1.1 Research question In this context, CT is becoming considered in many countries as a key set of problem-skills that must be developed by the new generations of students [12]. However, there is still little consensus about a formal definition of CT [14, 18], an alarming gap about how to measure and assess CT [16, 18]; and there are disagreements on how it should be integrated in educational curricula [19]. Furthermore, from a psychometric approach, CT is not a well-established psychological construct yet, as its nomological network [9] has not been fully defined; that is, the correlations between CT and other psychological constructs, whether (a) cognitive or (b) non-cognitive, have not been completely reported by the scientific community. Regarding to (a), a very recent paper describes the relations between CT and other cognitive variables [30]. These authors report statistically significant correlations at least moderately intense between CT and spatial ability (r = 0.44), reasoning ability (r = 0.44), and problem-solving ability (r = 0.67). These results empirically corroborate the conceptualization of CT as mainly a problem-solving ability, linked with g or fluid intelligence; this Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. TEEM'16, November 02 - 04, 2016, Salamanca, Spain Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM 978-1-4503-4747-1/16/11...$15.00. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3012430.3012496