Reasoning on children’s cognitive skills in an informatics contest: Findings and discoveries from Finland, Lithuania, and Sweden

Abstract

In this paper, we present the results from a multi-national study of students’ results in the international IT contest “Bebras”. Be-bras provides motivating and game-like tasks in the format of multiple-choice questions and interactive problems to students in grades 2-12. Our study focuses on the results of nearly 8 000 students aged 10-13 in Finland (n=852), Sweden (n=201) and Lithuania (n=7 022), using gender, task and country as the underlying variables. In addition to presenting the overall results of the three student groups, we also analyse a subset of tasks in common according to Bloom's taxonomy and put forward detailed results for these tasks with regard to gender and country. The results show that there is no difference in performance between boys and girls in this age group. Our findings also indicate that there was a slight mismatch between the difficulty level of the tasks used in the contest and students’ actual abilities; finding more efficient and trustworthy ways of evaluating difficulty levels upfront and choosing a suitable task set is hence important for upcoming contests.