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Modeling and Measuring High School Students’ Computational Thinking Practices in Science

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Abstract

Despite STEM education communities recognizing the importance of integrating computational thinking (CT) into high school curricula, computation still remains a separate area of study in K-12 contexts. In addition, much of the research on CT has focused on creating generally agreed-upon definitions and curricula, but few studies have empirically tested assessments or used contemporary learning sciences methods to do so. In this paper, we outline the implementation of an assessment approach for a 10-day high school biology unit with computational thinking activities that examines student pre-post responses as well as responses to embedded assessments throughout the unit. Using pre-post scores, we identified students with both positive and negative gains and examined how each group’s CT practices developed as they engaged with the curricular unit. Our results show that (1) students exhibited science and computational learning gains after engaging with a science unit with computational models and (2) that the use of embedded assessments and discourse analytics tools reveals how students think differently with computational tools throughout the unit.

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Notes

  1. Braun & Clark (2006) note that when researchers use a bottom-up approach, they do not completely analyze their data in an “epistemological vacuum” because they “can not free themselves [completely] of their theoretical and epistemological commitments.” Even if researchers do not explicitly take a theoretical or epistemological stance, their implicit biases and points of view shape the analysis of the data.

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Acknowledgments

This study was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (grants CNS-1138461, CNS-1441041, and DRL-1020101), the Spencer Foundation (Award #201600069), the National Science Foundation (DRL-1661036, DRL-1713110), the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The opinions, findings, and conclusions do not reflect the views of the funding agencies, cooperating institutions, or other individuals. Thank you to Daisy Rutstein from SRI for providing feedback on the development of the pre-post assessments.

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  1. Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA

    Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens

  2. Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Sugat Dabholkar, Connor Bain, Philip Woods, Kevin Hall, Hillary Swanson, Michael Horn & Uri Wilensky

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  1. Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens
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Correspondence to Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens.

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Appendix

Table 4 Rubrics used to score student pre and post assessments. Students received one point for each item on the rubric.
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Arastoopour Irgens, G., Dabholkar, S., Bain, C. et al. Modeling and Measuring High School Students’ Computational Thinking Practices in Science. J Sci Educ Technol 29, 137–161 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-020-09811-1

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