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Despite widespread adoption of the K-12 Computer Science Standards published by the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) in 2017, there remain few validated assessments for computer science that researchers and educators can use to measure students' conceptual understanding. Traditional assessments that do exist tend to consist largely of multiple-choice questions that do not adequately measure students' programming skills or their use of the computer science practices described in the standards. This project aims to develop and iteratively refine a mixed-format assessment for middle school computer science. The first phase of this work unpacked the middle school (6-8 grade band) CS standards to develop prototype items, including live coding tasks, that would assess the learning outcomes addressed therein. In phase 2, we tested the prototype items with students through cognitive interviews to better understand their response processes and the complex problem-solving and reasoning they demonstrated while taking the assessment.
Houchins et al. (Thu,) studied this question.