Replication, Validation, and Use of a Language Independent CS1 Knowledge Assessment

Computing education lags other discipline-based education research in the number and range of validated assessments available to the research community. Validated assessments are important for researchers to reduce experimental error due to flawed assessments and to allow for comparisons between different experiments. Although the need is great, building assessments from scratch is difficult. Once an assessment is built, it's important to be able to replicate it, in order to address problems within it, or to extend it. We developed the Second CS1 Assessment (SCS1) as an isomorphic version of a previously validated language-independent assessment for introductory computer science, the FCS1. Replicating the FCS1 is important to enable free use by a broader research community. This paper is documentation of our process for replicating an existing validated assessment and validating the success of our replication. We present initial use of SCS1 by other research groups, to serve as examples of where it might be used in the future. SCS1 is useful for researchers, but care must be taken to avoid undermining the validity argument.