Differences Between 9–10 Years Old Pupils’ Results from Slovak and Czech Bebras Contest

Abstract

The education system in Czechia and the education system in Slovakia are very similar but while in Slovakia the education reform (together with the reform of the curriculum for Informatics) was implemented some years ago, in Czechia it is currently being prepared. Informatics in Slovakia is taught from primary school, unlike in Czechia where it only appears in some types of high school. Nevertheless, both countries organise the Bebras challenge - the international Informatics contest. Therefore, we were interested in the achievement of pupils from the two countries, expecting Slovakian contestants to be more successful. We analysed the results from both competitions, focusing on the age category Little Beavers/Mini, which includes younger primary school pupils. This paper presents a case study, in which we compare Year 4 contestants (9 to 10 years old) from the two countries. Their results from 15 tasks with the same form and wording (to minimise the influence of other factors) were studied. As it results from the study, Slovakian Year 4 pupils are more successful in digital literacy tasks and in algorithmic tasks and they are slightly more successful in statement logic tasks and in programming tasks. In logic tasks dealing with graph theory no significant differences between among Year 4 pupils in Slovakia and Czechia were revealed. For each from the 15 tasks’ results, gender differences were also analysed - dividing tasks into three groups (girls’ tasks, boys’ tasks, neutral tasks), with almost the same distribution for both countries.