CIC: Semester 2, Week 1, Evaluation and Assessing Computational Thinking
Your portfolio for the second semester of this course will include an evaluation of how successful your educational materials are. This could be in terms of learners’ engagement, learning gains or some other relevant area. You could use a standardised survey, or assessment technique or design your own. We will discuss this further in class this week. It’s a good idea to make your plans for this now, particularly if you have a school visit coming up when you could collect data.
In the past 10 years, various standardised tests have been developed to help researchers evaluate whether interventions in CS Education are effective. This week we’ll look at the Computational Thinking Test (CTT), and in a future week we will look at ways to assess programming.
- Take the computational thinking test. You can find the answers here. It’s OK, you need never reveal your score…
- Curious about why the test was designed this way? Read the computational thinking assessment paper (You can get it for free if you are signed in to the UoE library). Don’t worry about the technical details of item response theory – you just need a broad understanding of how the test was developed. Focus on sections 1 and 4.
- Write a post to the EdStem discussion board about whether you think CTT is a suitable test. Your post should answer these questions:
- Does it measure what it intends to? How do you know?
- Could this assessment be used to help children learn? Or is it a way to measure their aptitude?
- Do you think the assessment can distinguish between poor and good performances?
- Under what circumstances would you advise teachers (or your classmates!) to use this?
- Will this be useful for your own portfolio (Report 2) which requires some evaluation of your materials?