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Building a Mixed-format Computer Science Assessment for Middle School

Published: 15 March 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Despite widespread adoption of the K-12 Computer Science Standards published by the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) in 2017, there remain few validated assessments for computer science that researchers and educators can use to measure students' conceptual understanding. Traditional assessments that do exist tend to consist largely of multiple-choice questions that do not adequately measure students' programming skills or their use of the computer science practices described in the standards. This project aims to develop and iteratively refine a mixed-format assessment for middle school computer science. The first phase of this work unpacked the middle school (6-8 grade band) CS standards to develop prototype items, including live coding tasks, that would assess the learning outcomes addressed therein. In phase 2, we tested the prototype items with students through cognitive interviews to better understand their response processes and the complex problem-solving and reasoning they demonstrated while taking the assessment.

References

[1]
AP Central textbar College Board. 2023. AP Computer Science Principles Course. College Board. https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer-science-principles/course
[2]
Miranda C. Parker, Yvonne S. Kao, Dana Saito-Stehberger, Diana Franklin, Susan Krause, Debra Richardson, and Mark Warschauer. 2021. Development and Preliminary Validation of the Assessment of Computing for Elementary Students (ACES). In Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 10--16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3408877.3432376
[3]
Arif Rachmatullah, Bita Akram, Danielle Boulden, Bradford Mott, Kristy Boyer, James Lester, and Eric Wiebe. 2020. Development and validation of the middle grades computer science concept inventory (MG-CSCI) assessment. Eurasia Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education 16, 5 (2020), em1841. https://doi.org/10.29333/ejmste/116600
[4]
David Weintrop and Uri Wilensky. 2015. Using Commutative Assessments to Compare Conceptual Understanding in Blocks-based and Text-based Programs. In Proceedings of the eleventh annual International Conference on International Computing Education Research (2015-08-09) (ICER '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 101--110. https://doi.org/10.1145/2787622.2787721

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE 2024: Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2
March 2024
2007 pages
ISBN:9798400704246
DOI:10.1145/3626253
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 March 2024

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  1. k-12 computing education
  2. middle school
  3. mixed-format assessment

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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