A Pair of ACES: An Analysis of Isomorphic Questions on an Elementary Computing Assessment

Background and Context. With increasing efforts to bring computing education opportunities into elementary schools, there is a growing need for assessments, with arguments for validity, to support research evaluation at these grade levels. After successfully piloting a 10-question computational thinking assessment (Assessment of Computing for Elementary Students – ACES) for 4th graders in Spring 2020, we used our analyses of item difficulty and discrimination to iterate on the assessment. Objectives. To increase the number of potential items for ACES, we created isomorphic versions of existing questions. The nature of the changes varied from incidental changes that we did not believe would impact student performance to more radical changes that seemed likely to influence question difficulty. We sought to understand the impact of these changes on student performance. Method. Using these isomorphic questions, we created two versions of our assessment and piloted them in Spring 2021 with 235 upper-elementary (4th grade) students. We analyzed the reliability of the assessments using Cronbach’s alpha. We used Chi-squared tests to analyze questions that were identical across the two assessments to form a baseline of comparison and then ran Chi-Squared and Kruskal-Wallis H tests to analyze the differences between the isomorphic copies of the questions. Findings. Both assessment versions demonstrated good reliability, with identical Cronbach’s alphas of 0.868. We found statistically similar performance on the identical questions between our two groups of students, allowing us to compare their performance on the isomorphic questions. Students performed differently on the isomorphic questions, indicating the changes to the questions had a differential impact on student performance. Implications. This paper builds on existing work by presenting methods for creating isomorphic questions. We provide valuable lessons learned, both on those methods and on the impact of specific types of changes on student performance.