ERIC Number: EJ1460479
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025
Pages: 23
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1360-2357
EISSN: EISSN-1573-7608
Available Date: 2024-07-01
Towards an Assessment Model of College Students' Computational Thinking with Text-Based Programming
Wei Zhang1; Xinyao Zeng1; Lingling Song1
Education and Information Technologies, v30 n2 p1363-1385 2025
Computational thinking (CT) assessment is crucial for testing the effectiveness of CT skills development. However, the exploration of CT assessment in the context of text-based programming is in its initial stages. The intrinsic relationship between the core skills of text-based programming and the core elements of CT isn't analyzed in depth in the CT assessment. This shortfall hinders the construction of a more scientific and effective CT assessment model for evaluating college students' CT skills. In this paper, we established the mapping relationship between the core skills of text-based programming and the core elements of CT through a comprehensive analysis and reasoned arguments, and proposed a CT assessment model that includes a parsing layer, a mapping layer, and a measurement layer. The parsing layer is designed to extract implicit programming skills from the program code. The mapping layer aligns the programming skills with the core elements of CT based on predefined mapping rules. The measurement layer processes data from the mapping layer using normalization methods to derive CT assessment results. In the final analysis, 52 college students' CT skills and sample code were analyzed through text-based programming tasks. The CT assessment results, subjected to the test analysis, revealed that the consistency test ICC coefficient was 0.684 (95% CI: 0.507 [approximately] 0.806) and the Pearson correlation coefficient was 0.845. This indicates that the proposed assessment model in this paper is applicable for evaluating college students' CT skills, and the assessment results exhibit high scientific validity and credibility. This study can serve as a valuable reference for researching the relationship between programming behavior and CT skills.
Descriptors: Mental Computation, Programming, College Students, Evaluation, Concept Mapping, Scientific Concepts, Validity, Credibility
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1Central China Normal University, Faculty of Artificial Intelligence in Education, Wuhan, China