Development and Validation of the Computational Thinking Test for Elementary School Students (CTT-ES): Correlate CT Competency With CT Disposition

Abstract

This study aimed to develop the Computational Thinking Test for Elementary School Students (CTT-ES) to assess young children’s CT competencies in non-programming contexts and also examine the relationship between CT competencies and CT dispositions. A survey including a pool of CTT-ES candidate items and the Computational Thinking Scale (CTS) was administered to 631 elementary school students. Rasch model of the Item Response Theory and the discrimination analysis of the Classical Testing Theory were conducted for item analyses. Pearson’s correlation analyses and hierarchical multiple regression analyses were used to examine the relationships between CTT-ES and CTS scores. The results showed that the final CTT-ES including 16 items had a good fitness, discrimination, and reliability to evaluate elementary students’ domain-general CT competencies. The convergent validity of CTT-ES was confirmed by its significant correlations with the CTS scores. The significant regression model not only showed students’ CT competencies can be predicted by their CT dispositions but also supported The Developmental Model of CT. This study provided a valid and reliable tool for assessing young children’s CT abilities. It also furthered our understanding about the developmental orders of CT abilities and contributed to the theoretical construction of CT.

competent Computational Thinking Test

“…More generally, paper-based assessments, such as the cCTt and those presented in the literature review, should be considered within a systems of assessments (Grover et al, 2015;Román-González et al, 2019;Guggemos et al, 2022) to gain a more comprehensive picture of students' CT competence. This is because paper-based assessments tend to lack insight into CT-processes (generally acquired through educational data mining) and CT-perspectives (generally acquired through self-assessment scales such as the Computational Thinking Scale by Korkmaz et al (2017) as was done by Guggemos et al 2022), with few studies having also looked into the link between CT and other abilities (such as numerical, verbal reasoning, and non verbal visuo-spatial abilities as was done by Tsai et al (2022) or spatial, reasoning, and problem solving abilities as was done by Román- González et al 2017).…”

A validity and reliability study of the formative model for the indicators of STEAM education creations

“…There has been great improvement in CT education in the last decade as a growing number of relevant studies have pointed out the importance of CT ability (Román-González et al, 2017), have developed courses (Kong, 2016;Kong et al, 2020), and have designed instructional materials to cultivate students' CT literacy (So et al, 2020) and also have promoted teacher's CT self-efficacy (Avcı & Deniz, 2022). Research problems and instructional tools have also become more diversified (Hsu et al, 2018;Tsai et al, 2022). Problem solving is not only required to be used in the information field, but is also an important ability in all fields (Herro et al, 2017).…”

“…However, how to deeply evaluate students' CT ability and learning process needs to be further explored (Tsai, et al, 2022). The previous research has probed into developing a CT scale, and designed plans for the evaluation of CT competence (Korkmaz, et al, 2017).…”