Designing Standards-Aligned Formative Assessments to Explore Middle School Students' Understanding of Algorithms

• In Event: Middle and High School Learners in Computing and Engineering Education

Abstract

'Algorithms’ is a core CS concept included in the K-12 CS learning standards, yet student challenges with understanding and using algorithms are still not well documented. This paper describes an approach to decompose the broad middle-school ‘algorithms’ standard into finer grained learning targets, develop formative assessment tasks aligned with the fine-grained learning targets, and use the tasks to explore student understanding of and challenges with the various concepts underlying the standard. We describe a number of student challenges revealed by our analysis of student responses to a set of standards-aligned formative assessment tasks. Our study underscores the importance of carefully designing formative assessment tasks to capture students’ understanding of, and challenges with grade-appropriate algorithm concepts.

Authors

• Satabdi Basu, SRI International
  Presenting Author

• Daisy Wise Rutstein, edCount, LLC
  Non-Presenting Author

• Arif Rachmatullah, SRI International
  Non-Presenting Author

• Carol Tate, SRI International
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hui Yang, SRI International
  Non-Presenting Author

• Christopher Ortiz, SRI International
  Non-Presenting Author