Assessing elementary students’ computational thinking in everyday reasoning and robotics programming

Based on a framework of computational thinking (CT) adapted from Computer Science Teacher Association's standards, an instrument was developed to assess fifth grade students' CT. The items were contextualized in two types of CT application (coding in robotics and reasoning of everyday even...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computers and education Vol. 109; pp. 162 - 175
Main Authors: Chen, Guanhua, Shen, Ji, Barth-Cohen, Lauren, Jiang, Shiyan, Huang, Xiaoting, Eltoukhy, Moataz
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.06.2017
Subjects:
Computational thinking
Evaluation methodologies
Programming and programming languages
Robotics education
Computational thinking
Evaluation methodologies
Programming and programming languages
Robotics education
ISSN:0360-1315, 1873-782X
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Based on a framework of computational thinking (CT) adapted from Computer Science Teacher Association's standards, an instrument was developed to assess fifth grade students' CT. The items were contextualized in two types of CT application (coding in robotics and reasoning of everyday events). The instrument was administered as a pre and post measure in an elementary school where a new humanoid robotics curriculum was adopted by their fifth grade. Results show that the instrument has good psychometric properties and has the potential to reveal student learning challenges and growth in terms of CT. •Assess computational thinking (CT) in ways that are independent of platform.•Assess fifth graders' CT in both everyday and programming settings.•Psychometric analysis of the instrument shows high quality.
ISSN:0360-1315
1873-782X
DOI:10.1016/j.compedu.2017.03.001