According to the changes from industrial society to digital society, software education for ordinary
people has been popular both in home and overseas. In particular, due to the revision of the curriculum of
Informatics in 2015, the interest on software education has been rising. Recently, various types of
instructional materials have being developed, and thus, many schools are concerned about what to teach.
Typically, most teachers do not choose a programming language based on the characteristics of the
language but based on the stableness or popularity of the language. Focusing the RUR-PLE, which has
been taught in many schools recently, this paper surveyed high school students, who learned the RUR-PLE
for a semester, on the abstract thinking ability, problem solving ability, and academic achievement. And
then, this research analyzed the relationship between abstract thinking ability and problem solving ability.
As a result, the student group at low construal level performed better in predicting concrete actions of the
robot of the RUR-PLE unlike the C language. In addition, we examined if there exists an interaction effect
between abstract thinking ability and language experience about program understanding ability. From the
research results, we knew the importance of the appropriate language selection for improving the secondary
school students’ thinking ability.