Using SOLO to Classify the Programming Responses of Primary Grade Students

Abstract

This paper presents an assessment designed to measure computational thinking skills of fourth grade students. The students in two public schools were given a set of Scratch programming challenges. The SOLO taxonomy was used to classify student programming responses based on the degree of understanding of the problem structure. The majority of fourth grade students from one school demonstrated the ability to synchronize the costume and motion of a single character sprite, as well as synchronize a basic conversation between multiple sprites. However, they struggled to integrate motion and costume changes into a multi-sprite conversation. The majority of fourth grade students from the second school, where reading and math comprehension scores fall below the state minimum requirements for proficiency, were unable to demonstrate a basic understanding of the programming tasks. The results suggest that fourth grade students who read at grade level are capable of understanding the relationships between multiple concerns within a single script, along with synchronizing a single concern across multiple scripts, but are challenged when synchronizing multiple concerns across multiple scripts.

Unravelling the Cognition of Coding in 3-to-6-year Olds

“…To the best of our knowledge, we are the first research team to develop such an assessment using a tangible robot, and the first to develop an assessment for such a young age group. Previously developed tests typically focus on older children and have used digital environments (e.g., the Computation Thinking test [27], Fairy Assessment in Alice [32], Computational Thinking Patterns in AgentSheets [18], Dr. Scratch [22], Foundations for Advancing Computational Thinking [9], classifying programming responses with SOLO [29]). The only comparable effort with young children that we are aware of was that of Bers [31].…”

Enhancing Mental Rotation Skills through Google SketchUp

“…It is particularly applicable to the measurement and categorisation of different levels of conceptual understanding and open-ended tasks [32][33][34]. SOLO taxonomy has been used to classify students' responses to computer programming problems [35][36][37][38]. SOLO was also been applied to many different subjects like mathematics [39], language studies [40], biology [41].…”

Robótica Educacional como Estratégia de Promoção do Pensamento Computacional - Uma Proposta de Metodologia Baseada em Taxonomias de Aprendizagem

“…Para avaliar esta fase recomenda-se a utilização do modelo proposto em [Seiter 2015] onde o código desenvolvido pelos alunos, para responder aos desafios,é avaliado segundo um "gabarito" que permite classificar a produção dos alunos pela taxonomia SOLO. O gabarito pode ajudar a identificar o nível de entendimento dos alunos em conceitos mais específicos da programação como seleção/condição, repetição/laços, variáveis e paralelismo.…”

“…No que diz respeitoà utilização da taxonomia SOLO em projetos relacionados ao PC, em [Seiter 2015] foram propostos desafios a serem resolvidos por meio de programação com Scratch. A avaliação foi realizada de acordo com um "gabarito" que facilita o enquadramento do código em um determinado nível da taxonomia SOLO, ou seja, o nível de entendimento alcançado pelo aluno em relação a estrutura do problema.…”