Development and Validation of the Computational Thinking Assessment Tool DACT

Although computational thinking (CT) has attracted researchers’ and educators’ interest for the last 20 years, resulting in new educational approaches and reformation of curricula, more research work needs to be performed, especially in the field of CT assessment. Taking this need into consideration, this article describes the development of a new CT assessment tool. The DACT CT assessment tool is developed based on CT literature, taking into consideration six basic CT dimensions. Initially, 90 CT assessment tasks are created, which are examined and reformed through a pilot study. The main research consists of an extensive study (521 students), which has resulted in the construction of the DACT CT assessment tool through continuous monitoring of Cronbach’s α, consisting of 36 final tasks. DACT is disengaged from programming, does not require a specific programming language as it uses its own micro-world, is cross-platform and can be administered online or in paper format mode, supported by an administering protocol. This article also discusses the validation process of the DACT and argues on several validation checks, such as face validity, criterion validity and concurrent validity. This work has the ambition to provide a new, useful CT assessment tool to the scientific community.