education sciences Article The Comparison of Students’ Self-Assessment, Gender, and Programming-Oriented Spreadsheet Skills Tímea Nagy, Mária Csernoch * and Piroska Biró   Citation: Nagy, T.; Csernoch, M.; Biró, P. The Comparison of Students’ Self-Assessment, Gender, and Programming-Oriented Spreadsheet Skills. Educ. Sci. 2021, 11, 590. https://doi.org/10.3390/ educsci11100590 Academic Editor: Diego Vergara Received: 8 August 2021 Accepted: 20 September 2021 Published: 28 September 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Faculty of Informatics, University of Debrecen, 4028 Debrecen, Hungary; nagy.timea@inf.unideb.hu (T.N.); biro.piroska@inf.unideb.hu (P.B.) * Correspondence: csernoch.maria@inf.unideb.hu Abstract: Previous research proved that teaching spreadsheeting from a programming perspective is much more effective than the widely accepted tool-centered surface approach methods. Spread- sheeting as an introductory programming approach allows students to build up schemata leading to contextualized, concept-based problem-solving. Furthermore, it provides tools for real-world problem-solving in other disciplines, and supports knowledge-transfer to database management and “serious” programming. The present study provides the details of a nationwide testing of Grades 7–10 students on how they evaluate their spreadsheet knowledge, which classroom activities form their self-assessment values, and the results of three spreadsheet tasks evaluated by the SOLO categories of understanding. The comparison reveals that most students’ spreadsheet knowledge is pre-structural. On the other hand, they assess themselves much higher, which is primarily based on the number of activities carried out in classes. Traces of conscious problem-solving and knowledge-transfer within the scope of spreadsheeting are hardly detectable, while knowledge brought from mathematics is recognizable. In general, we found proof that the pieces of knowledge remain unconnected, not allowing students to reach the relational level of understanding and build up long-lasting knowledge. Keywords: spreadsheet; self-assessment; knowledge-transfer; computer problem-solving; programming 1. Introduction 1.1. Should We Teach Students to Program? Hungary is one of the countries in the world where informatics as a school subject was introduced as early as the mid-‘90s [1–3] in the first National Base Curriculum [4]. Various names and numbers of classes (from 2009) have been assigned to the subject in the meantime (Table 1)[4–7], with only minor changes in the content, detailed in the frame curricula. A thorough analysis of the 2013 issues [8,9] revealed, on the one hand, that the same material should be taught regardless of the name of the school subject, while on the other hand, that the same amount of material should be taught regardless of the number of classes [10–14] assigned to the subject. The research also revealed that the content of the frame curricula [8,9] is (1) oversized, even in the case of the largest number of classes, (2) loaded with a high number of ambiguous terms, (3) tool-centered, and (4) strictly divided into distinct subthemes. Furthermore, the research found that problem-solving is restricted to programming. One consequence of the low number of lessons along with the overestimated, over- planned content is that informatics education has become a rather tool-oriented, boring, good-for-nothing subject which [15–18] does not support the development of computa- tional thinking as a fundamental skill [19]. The widely accepted and popular low mathabil- ity [20,21] teaching approaches commit all of the errors which were outlined as early as 1993 in Soloway’s paper [22]. The author and his fellow researchers claimed that schools are inefficient in terms of teaching programming and developing students’ algorithmic Educ. Sci. 2021, 11, 590. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11100590 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/education