ERIC Number: ED571389
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2016-Oct
Pages: 11
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Task-Based Assessment of Students' Computational Thinking Skills Developed through Visual Programming or Tangible Coding Environments
Djambong, Takam; Freiman, Viktor
International Association for Development of the Information Society, Paper presented at the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA) (13th, Mannheim, Germany, Oct 28-30, 2016)
While today's schools in several countries, like Canada, are about to bring back programming to their curricula, a new conceptual angle, namely one of computational thinking, draws attention of researchers. In order to understand the articulation between computational thinking tasks in one side, student's targeted skills, and the types of problems they aim to solve, we conducted a small-scale pilot case-study with two groups of students for the elementary (grade 6) and middle (grade 9) grades. While the students were working on 5-week-long curricular units in technology using robotics-based and computer-programming environments, we assessed their computational thinking abilities with 23 tasks given as pre- and post-test. Aiming to validate the tasks, namely, to see in what way it allows measuring computational things, we found a disparity between the types of the skills assessed, the easiness of the tasks, and the age groups, which makes difficult to arrive to some stable conclusion. We stated then a need for a longer and more sophisticated assessment as a subsequent research perspective to establish a stronger empirical evidence of possible relationships between related variables. [For full proceedings, see ED571332.]
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Computer Science Education, Programming, Computation, Thinking Skills, Skill Development, Performance Based Assessment, Case Studies, Elementary School Students, Middle School Students, Grade 6, Grade 9, Robotics, Pretests Posttests, Age Differences, Difficulty Level, Statistical Analysis
International Association for the Development of the Information Society. e-mail: secretariat@iadis.org; Web site: http://www.iadisportal.org
Publication Type: Reports - Research; Speeches/Meeting Papers
Education Level: Elementary Education; Middle Schools; Secondary Education; Junior High Schools; Grade 6; Intermediate Grades; Grade 9; High Schools
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Canada
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A