Assessing Computational Thinking Skills at First Stages of Schooling

Abstract

Computational thinking has already been acknowledged as an important learning objective for all students in compulsory education. Our research interests focus on the assessment of fundamental computational thinking competencies, such as collection, organisation and analysis of data, algorithmic thinking and abstraction. For the needs of our research, we implemented the digital platform PhysGramming, which constitutes the backbone of a relevant assessment tool we have built. PhysGramming is developmentally appropriate for first and second grade primary school students and provides the opportunity to create their own digital games, transforming them from passive consumers to active creators of digital technology. The assessment tool has been applied to 450 students in the first and second grade of primary schools on Crete, Greece from February to June 2019. The research was conducted attuned to the ethical guidelines of educational research, within the framework of the physical and natural science courses and evolved around three axes: (a) Checking the validity and the reliability of the results that come out when applying the proposed assessment tool. (b) Designating the levels of computational thinking skills of students at first stages of schooling. (c) Checking the correlation between the levels of computational thinking skills and the comprehension of the lesson's content. In other words, we check whether high learning performance is a necessary and sufficient condition for diagnosing high levels of basic computational thinking skills. In this paper, we shortly describe the assessment tool we propose.