Developing a game-based test to assess middle school sixth-grade students’ algorithmic thinking skills

Abstract

This study was carried out to develop a test to assess algorithmic thinking skills. To this end, the twelve steps suggested by Downing (2006) were adopted. Throughout the test development, 24 middle school sixth-grade students and eight experts in different areas took part as needed in the tasks on the project. The test was given to 252 students attending the sixth grade who were selected through purposeful sampling. The content validity of the test was ensured by means of obtaining expert opinion, whereas the construct validity was ensured by performing an independent sample t-test on the difference between the lower and upper groups. As a result, the algorithmic thinking skills assessment test was finalized with 22 main items and 2 sample items, totalling 24 items. The KR-20 reliability analysis proved a quite reliable test based on the reliability coefficient of 0.83. As mentioned earlier, the independent sample t-test was applied to the difference of lower and upper groups for construct validation of the test. It was seen that the test items are significant in discriminating the students in the lower and upper groups (p<0.01).