Sezai Kocabas

• Master of Science
• Research Assistant at Purdue University West Lafayette

One of the most important goals of education is to ensure the quality of teaching and learning. Sense of teacher’s self-efficacy affects the quality throughout the contribution to all stakeholders in educational process. The right of religious education is one of the essential rights in the world. Moreover, it has positive effect on the society by...

Our study builds upon K-2 students' early block building experiences and the increased importance of fostering computational thinking skills, especially debugging. We had 12 K-2 students debug a Lego structure by finding and fixing differences between a given and target structure. Half of the students worked with red Lego bricks only while the othe...

Elementary students demonstrate conflicts when measuring with rulers as well as measuring with discrete units. Their conflicts often lie in their focus on counting tick marks or focusing on the endpoint of objects on rulers or ignoring spaces with discrete units. In this study, we also investigated another area of conflict: students' conceptions on...

Block building activities help develop students' spatial reasoning, but few studies focus on the development of block building skills beyond preschool. We worked with four kindergarten, four first grade, and four second grade students to learn more about their Lego block building. We compared students' accuracy, building strategies, and spatial lan...

This study blended the fields of debugging, spatial thinking, and change detection. We explored 12 K-2 students’ debugging skills as they fixed a Lego structure by using multicolor or grayscale manuals. Students in both groups were most likely to debug the bugs on the top and bottom of the structure, while the multi-color group was more successful...

Elementary students’ early development of embedding and disembedding is complex and paves the way for later STEM learning. The purpose of this study was to clarify the factors that support students’ embedding (i.e., overlapping shapes to form a new shape) and disembedding (i.e., identifying discrete shapes within another shape) through the use of f...

Although learning to program can improve students’ computational thinking skills—specifically, creating and debugging algorithms—we need to determine instructional strategies that foster such skills in young students. We investigated the role of analyzing worked examples that focused on creating and debugging programming algorithms with 28 first an...

We investigated how 28 first graders and 27 third graders, who analyzed worked examples as part of a programming intervention, debugged (identified and fixed bugs) and reasoned about double-counting errors in mathematics and programming tasks. Students completed the tasks on a pretest, a midtest (only programming tasks), and a posttest. Results sho...

We conducted an in-depth analysis to better understand the role of playing versus analyzing worked examples when learning programming commands. Our findings, focused on two pairs of third graders, demonstrated that students did not use complex programming commands when only playing; whereas, when supported through analysis of worked examples, they...

To identify early elementary students’ conceptions of programmers, we interviewed 32 first graders and 37 third graders using a draw a programmer test. Students’ responses were roughly split between drawing a person at a computer, drawing a computer only, drawing a person only, or skipping it. Unlike in related studies, students did not have strong...

STEM education was a systematic teaching and/or learning process in the STEM fields and a positive correlation existed between STEM education, and the economic prosperity and power of a nation in the globalized world. In recent years, rising concerns have emerged about American STEM education. Many stakeholders wondered that whether the nation has...

In this paper we present the meta-analysis of research articles on the effects of LEGO based interventions on students’ STEM achievements. 11 experimental/quasi experimental studies were included in the meta-analysis providing 17 unique data sets. The effect sizes for students’ achievements in mathematics, science, technology and engineering are ca...