Sprego: case study on the effectiveness of teaching spreadsheet management with schema construction

Abstract

In the modern, information driven society managing and handling data is unavoidable. The most common form of data handling is to organize data into tables and complete operations on them in spreadsheets. Sprego (Spreadsheet Lego) is a programmingoriented methodology focusing on schemata construction and authentic problemsolving working with only a limited number of general-purpose functions. In our current study the goal is to present Sprego as an alternative method for spreadsheeting, and to measure its effectiveness in education compared to the traditional surface approach methods. We also aim to highlight the advantages of teaching datamanagement, spreadsheeting, and introduction to programming by applying an algorithmic and schemata centric method in a user-friendly interface. The teaching and testing were carried out in three classes of a local middle and high school with two experimental and one control groups. Based on our results, it is found that the Sprego methodology is significantly more effective than the traditional surface approach methods. Furthermore, it is also proved, in accordance with similar studies in sciences, that students, who had studied traditional spreadsheet management in advance to this experience, have difficulties switching to Sprego. Although these students alternate between the two approaches, our measurements clearly prove that the traditional approach is pushed into the background, as students prefer to solve problems using Sprego. Our findings also imply that traditional methods do not develop long-lasting knowledge which students could rely on, and have a negative effect on their development, while Sprego seems much more reliable.

The Comparison of Students’ Self-Assessment, Gender, and Programming-Oriented Spreadsheet Skills

“…Previous research proved that teaching spreadsheeting from a programming aspect [27,28,73,74] is much more effective [71,[75][76][77] than the widely accepted tool-centered low-mathability methods. The surface approach methods-focusing on the teaching of how the user interface works, typing spreadsheet tables, browsing wizards and help, coursebooks introducing as many functions as possible, and softwares offering newer and newer functions and features-do not support schema construction.…”

“…On the contrary, most of the students' results based on the three tasks of the test are pre-structural (84.7%), which means that no recognizable pieces of knowledge are present. The students' results demonstrate that the decontextualized, tool-centered, low-mathability approaches that characterize computer science education are inadequate for developing students' problem-solving and computational thinking skills [28,41,42,59,62,[73][74][75][76][77][78]. Furthermore, in complete accordance with the Dunning-Kruger effect [91], the pre-structural level of understanding (missing the point) prevents students from seeing what they do not know.…”

“…Previously conducted research has proven that teaching spreadsheeting from a programming point of view and using functional languages as introductory programming languages is significantly more effective than either the interface-centered or the imperative or object-oriented "classical" methods [27,28,[71][72][73][74][75][76][77]. Being aware of these results and that school grade levels are often not good indicators of where students are in their cognitive development, the students' self-assessment values are compared to their results in the test.…”

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“…Teaching spreadsheet has an important role in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) education because students learn several aspects of computer science and develop skills connected to this field, for example, handling data structures, database management, programming principles, logical and computational thinking, and algorithmic skills. Sprego also promotes schema construction through authentic problem-solving and algorithm construction (Csapó et al 2020).…”

Case study: Developing long-term knowledge with Sprego

“…() functions, 3 end-users are required to code concatenated strings, instead of simple yes/no questions (Fig. 2) (Csernoch 2014). Consequently, students have to memorize a great amount of information about problem-specific functions, as several parts of this knowledge are tied to specific situations.…”