=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2650/paper31
|storemode=property
|title=Students’ Knowledge in File Management After Elementary School
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2650/paper31.pdf
|volume=Vol-2650
|authors=Katalin Sebestyén
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icai3/Sebestyen20
}}
==Students’ Knowledge in File Management After Elementary School==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2650/paper31.pdf
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Applied Informatics
Eger, Hungary, January 29–31, 2020, published at http://ceur-ws.org
Students’ Knowledge in File Management
After Elementary School
Katalin Sebestyén
University of Debrecen, Doctoral School of Informatics
26 Kassai út, Debrecen 4028, Hungary
sebestyen.katalin@inf.unideb.hu
Abstract
According to the Hungarian Frame Curriculum, teaching informatics
starts in grade 6 as a compulsory subject, with only one class a week. By
this time students are regular smartphone and/or computer users, primarily
applying trial-and-error based computer problem-solving methods. In this
way they gain knowledge through their own experiences and observations,
without any guidance. In the Frame Curriculum the first topic is file man-
agement, which is the basis of operating system use and further data-handling
procedures. Due to the late introduction of informatics in schools and the
different levels of knowledge that students bring into the classes this topic is
difficult to teach. In addition, this topic is not sufficiently emphasized and
practiced, since both students and teachers consider it to consist of elemen-
tary, born-with knowledge. Consequently, students evaluate their knowledge
as high, but practice does not justify this assessment.
Our research team invented and applied a knowledge-transfer based
webtable-datatable conversion process to cover file-, elementary data- and
webpage-management. In order to quantify and prove the efficiency of the
method, we tested grade 9 students in experimental and control groups, cov-
ering the topic with our novel and with traditional methods, respectively.
During the research period, the students were tested in two rounds: in a
pre-test, before they studied the topic to record what knowledge is brought
into classes, and in a post-test, after the intervention. The test included tasks
involving error message interpretation, recognizing file types based on default
associations and conventions, explaining algorithms, and handling data files.
This article presents the results of students in the pre-test administered in
grade 9, starting their secondary education. It was found that when studying
this topic with the trial-end-error methods, students do not build up knowl-
edge in long-term memory, cannot see the algorithms behind fundamental
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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file management processes, and consequently cannot solve real-world prob-
lems effectively. These results clearly show that there is a need for changes
in the approaches adopted to file management.
Keywords: IT education, file management, elementary school
1. Introduction
The Hungarian Frame Curricula [1][2] is developed on the basis of the National
Base Curricula [3]. These documents tend to follow Prensky’s [4] ideas, i.e. that
the members of the Z-generation are digital natives, so they do not need ICT (In-
formation and Communications Technology) education. This resulted in a drastic
reduction in the number of ICT classes in the Frame Curricula. The number of
classes decreased from 9.5 [1] to 5 [2], while the amount of knowledge items present
in the curricula remained unchanged. This drastic decrease may be the reason that
teachers neglect the proper teaching of file management.
The results of PISA 2009 Students On Line [5] clearly shows that the Frame
Curricula and the traditional methods do not develop the students’ digital literacy,
or their algorithmic and computational thinking skills efficiently in Hungary. The
country is ranked 15th of the 19 participating countries. Furthermore, analyzing
the connection between the students’ PISA scores and computer use at schools
reveals that in this respect Hungarian students are the weakest.
According to researchers [6][7][8][9], computational thinking is the fourth basic
skill along-side writing, reading and mathematics. Consequently, like the other
three skills, it should be improved and be a part of the core fundamentals of
education [10][11][12]. Furthermore, ICT education should not focus on tool-,
interface-, and environment-usage, but rather on problem-solving with an algo-
rithmic focus [10][13]. Settle’s [14] work at the Lab Schools demonstrates that
computational thinking can be integrated into high-school courses. She considers
the application and integration of computational thinking especially important in
non-computational environments as well [14].
2. Students’ knowledge of file management
The aim of this testing is to measure the students’ algorithmic and computational
thinking skills through knowledge-transfer elements connected to file management
at the beginning of their secondary education.
2.1. Participants, sample
We tested first-year secondary school students’ file management skills in grade 9.
The measurement involved two schools in Hungary. Considering all groups, 109
students completed the pre-test.
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2.2. Previous studies
In 2018 a Mini-Competence Test [15][16] with similar tasks was conducted in 93
schools with 8,880 participants. Students from grades 7 to 10 took part in the
measurement. In this paper we only focus on the data of grade 7 and 8 elemen-
tary school students of the previous test, 1,562 and 1,643 students, respectively.
The measurement included a self-evaluation part where the students were asked to
mark how familiar they are with the given ICT topics, including file management
(Figure 1).
Figure 1: An extract of the Mini-Competence Test self-evaluation
part, inquiring about familiarity with the file management topic
Figure 2 reflects the results of the file management topic in the self-evaluation
task. No significant differences were revealed between grade 7 and 8 students.
Most of them (79.06%) choose options 3, 4 or 5, (good, very good and excellent,
respectively). Note, that 32.64% of the students selected the highest (5) option.
Figure 3 shows the proportion of respondents who studied file management in
school, with 14.72% of grade 7 and 8 students admitting that they did not study
file management in school.
In the diagram on Figure 6, the correlations between the students’ answers for
both their knowledge level and for the source of their knowledge are presented.
Most of the students marking 3, 4, or 5 also indicated that a high proportion of
them studied the topic in schools: 80%, 30.33%, 37.59%, respectively. Interestingly,
those students who do not study file management in school are confident they have
knowledge of this topic (mark 4-5: 40.04%). This leads to the conclusion that
despite having studied the topic, the students do not necessarily feel that they
have mastered the topic.
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Figure 2: The self-assessment results of grade 7 and 8 students
regarding the topic of file management
Figure 3: The results of students’ answers for the self-assessment
task considering whether they studied file management in school or
not
2.3. Measuring prior file management knowledge in grade 9
2.3.1. Tasks and results
Task F1 (section 4) was about the interpretation of the Windows file rename warn-
ing message, where students had to choose from a number of given answers. Note
that we allowed students to mark multiple answers, while only one of them was
correct. 4.59% of the students marked only the correct answer; considering mul-
299
tiple selections, the correct answer was chosen in the lowest proportion (15.60%)
(Figure 4). The high proportion of incorrect answers shows that students have no
knowledge about data file types and the role of extensions.
Figure 4: The distribution of the selected answers in Task F1
This statement is further supported by the results of Task F2: “What happens
when we double-click on a document file?”. Based on the answers, the students
are only familiar with the last step (opening) of the 4-step process. This is in
accordance with the results of Task F1, as students are not only unfamiliar with
the roles of extensions, but with their connection with the operating system, as
well.
In Task F3 the students had to provide an answer as to how a spreadsheet can
be converted into a text file. Despite the task stating that only one answer was
to be selected, 8.26% of the students ignored this instruction (Table 1). 38.53% of
the students marked the correct answer together with others, while only 35.78%
marked only the correct option (Table 1).
Task F4 inquired about the cut file operation: “What happens when you cut
a file?”. Similarly to the previous tasks, the students had to choose their answers
from the listed options. We allowed multiple selections even though that there was
only one correct answer. 35.78% of the students completed this task successfully,
while 35.90% marked the correct answer besides other options (Table 2).
In Task F5, the students had to decide the types of the listed files, considering
their names and extensions. Based on Tasks F1 and F2, we have found that the
students are not familiar with the definition of various extensions. The results
of the current task support and extend this finding. This can be explained by
the widespread use of the File Explorer present in Windows systems, where the
extensions of the files are hidden by default.
We accepted the options listed in the second row of Table 3 as correct solutions
(if the students only marked one answer). 37.31% of the students completed the
300
Table 1: The distribution of answers in Task F3, highlighting the
correct answers.
Table 2: The distribution of student wrong answers along with the
correct answer in Task F4
Figure 5: The number of correctly recognized the file types in
Task F5
task (Table 6). Based on the diagram shown in Figure 5, there were no students
who provided correct answers for each file. Most of them recognized two or three
301
Table 3: The correct solutions and the proportions of student an-
swers in Task F5
file types correctly.
Table 4: The solutions for Task F6 and the proportion of correct
answers.
To analyze the connection between the answers, we conducted a correlation
analysis using Guilford’s approach [17]. Based on our matrix, no solid correla-
tion could be found except “low correlation, relationship definite but small” [17]
occurrences (±0.2–0.4).
We designed Task F6 to have multiple questions inquiring about the same
knowledge items using differing approaches and phrasing. In this way we could
gather data about the conscious choices and reliable knowledge of students. Each
question could be answered with the following options: true, false or I don’t know
(Table 4). In summary, 42.05% of the students completed the task correctly.
Table 5 shows the knowledge items required for solving Task F6. The stu-
dents had to be familiar with the concept of extensions, assignment, file types and
opening, editing and saving files. Table 5 shows which statements rely on what
knowledge items. We expected correlations between answers for statements relying
on the same items.
We completed a correlation analysis of the answers, considering the knowledge
items required for the solution. The results show a weak correlation between the
answers (below 0.4). Interestingly, we could not find any connection between the
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Table 5: The knowledge items required (marked with +) for cor-
rectly answering the statements
Table 6: The rate of correct answers for each task in the file man-
agement test
correlations and the knowledge items, as the results of the analysis yielded a ran-
domized pattern.
To summarize the results for each task, Table 6 shows the correct completion
rates of the file management test. The students completed the test with varying
results. Considering the whole test, 32.34% of them completed it successfully, which
is a lower proportion than the results expected on the basis of the self-assessment
test in section 2.2 (p=0.000).
The results of the file management test have been converted to a scale of 0-5
(Figure 7) to make them comparable to the results of the Mini-Competence Test
(Figure 6). Most of the students have confidence in their knowledge, despite the
fact that in the file management test none of them reached knowledge level four.
303
Figure 6: The summarized results in the file management self-
assessment task and the proportion of those studying the topic at
school
Figure 7: The results of the file management test displayed on a
scale of 0-5
3. Conclusion
ICT education start as a mandatory subject in grade 6 in Hungary with 1 class per
week. By that time, students are regular users of smartphones, laptops, and/or
desktop computers. It follows that they met and started learning the topic of file
management by themselves. This leads to students showing unsupported confi-
dence when the topic first emerges in grade 6, causing the class to move forward to
304
different topics after a brief introduction. The results of the self-assessment part of
the Mini-Competence Test show that students are overconfident about their knowl-
edge. This shows a connection with the results of the PISA 2009 measurement.
The results of our file management test and measurement shows that the stu-
dents lack basic knowledge in the topic, such as extensions, cut, file type, etc. As
these items are frequently revisited and required in ICT education and in everyday
computer use as well, this deficiency cannot be ignored. Furthermore, the knowl-
edge students do have is fragmented, which resulted in randomized answers in the
test. Moreover, their answers were inconsistent and showed no correlation in tasks
requiring the same knowledge items.
The students (as digital natives) after completing primary education – with
a minimum of 3 years of ICT education – do not possess the required level of
knowledge of file management that would enable the conscious use of file operations
and data handling. Therefore, the optimal and effective use of the available ICT
lessons is recommended, but this can only be possible with novel approaches. The
file management topic demands a greater emphasis within the wider subject area,
accompanied by the correct and accurate use of the terminology.
Acknowledgements. This work was supported by the construction EFOP-3.6.3-
VEKOP-16-2017-00002. The project was supported by the European Union, co-
financed by the European Social Fund.
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4. Appendix
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