This afternoon (9/30), Markeya Peteranetz and Leen-Kiat Soh will share their work on developing and validating the Computational Thinking Concepts and Skills Test.
Title: Development and Validation of A Concepts and Skills Test: Affordances and Challenges
Abstract:
When doing education research, there is often a need to create a new assessment to meet the specific needs of the researcher for the context and population being studied. We encountered this challenge when studying undergraduate computer science students’ computational thinking knowledge and skills. At the time of our work, few such tests had been created and even fewer had documented rigorous psychometric evaluation. At the SIGCSE Technical Symposium conference in 2020, we presented our work developing and validating the Computational Thinking Concepts and Skills Test (CTCAST). We administered the test to students in several courses, evaluated and revised, and then administered to another group of students. Part of the revision included changing half of the items to a multiple-select format. We compared three different scoring methods for the multiple-select items to each other and to scores on a different test of core computer science knowledge. Partial-credit scoring methods resulted in more reliable test scores, lower item difficulty for multiple-select items, and improved item discrimination for most multiple-choice and multiple-select items. In this talk, we will describe the development and evaluation process we undertook in creating this test and highlight the affordances and challenges associated with scoring and evaluating multiple-select test items.
Date: Thursday, 9/30, from 2-3pm
Location: This seminar will be held via zoom at https://unl.zoom.us/j/212107342