The Fairy Performance Assessment Measuri

The Fairy Performance Assessment: Measuring Computational Thinking in Middle School Werner, Denner, Campe

Webb (2010): pre, post doesn’t make sense when pre it doesn’t even make sense to have people work on the assessment.  Could there be an assessment of comp. literacy if not CT?

*** I need a stable construct for literacy. Maybe Brigid’s paper could help with this?

Linn described the Chain of Cognitive Accomplishments [9], which includes three links: Comprehension: understand programs and be able to make small changes to single program instructions; Design: build programs from collections of patterns and use procedural skills to combine these patterns to solve problems; and Problem Solving: learn transferable problem-solving skills and use them in new and different formal systems.

Additional questions measure confidence with computers (e.g., I feel confident about my ability to use computers), attitude toward computers (e.g., I would like to learn more about computers), frequency and type of computer use, and simple Alice content knowledge (8 multiple-choice items with screen shots of images and sample code). Classroom teachers collected attendance data that we used to compute total number of hours attended, as well as total number of hours that students in the paired condition worked with a partner. The parent completing the consent form reported parent education levels.

3 tasks, not building on each other.

Email Linda Werner about getting the Fairy rubric: linda@soe.ucsc.edu

Levine and Donitsa-Schmidt [7] on confidence with computers

See Lee et al, 2011 for Use-Modify-Create pattern of working with tool

REFERENCES TO FOLLOW

Lee, L., Martin, F., Denner, J., Coulter, B., Allan, W., Erickson, J., Malyn-Smith, J., and Werner, L., 2011. Computational thinking for youth in practice. ACM Inroads 2, 1, 32-37.

Linn, M. C., 1985. The Cognitive Consequences of Programming Instruction in Classrooms. Educational Researcher, Vol. 14, No. 5, pp. 14-16+25-29 at http://www.jstor.org/stable/1174202.

Webb, D.C., 2010 Troubleshooting assessment: an authentic problem solving activity for it education, Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, Volume 9, World Conference on Learning, Teaching and Administration Papers, pp. 903-907.