Identifying Kindergarten Students' Strategies as They Solve Computational Thinking Performance Assessment Tasks

• In Event: Computing and Robotics in Early Education

Abstract

The burgeoning field of children’s computational thinking (CT) lacks an understanding of the strategies young children use to solve CT assessment tasks. Extant models of early childhood assessments that do account for strategies do not necessarily provide a blueprint for assessment designers who wish to gather information beyond whether children answered the question correctly. This paper addresses a substantive gap in our knowledge of the types of strategies that young children use when solving CT tasks. Drawing on assessments of Kindergarteners (n=77) during a pilot CT assessment, we present our methods for qualitatively analyzing the data and report the results of this analysis. Results indicated children used 15 algorithmic thinking strategies, 7 debugging strategies, and 8 decomposition strategies.

Authors

• Lise E. Welch, Utah State University

• Joseph S. Kozlowski, Utah State University

• Deborah Silvis, SUNY - College at Cortland

• Jody E. Clarke-Midura, Utah State University

• Jessica F. Shumway, Utah State University

• Victor R. Lee, Stanford University