Measuring Children’s Computational Thinking Skills

Dear Colleagues:

Computational Thinking (CT) skills equip young learners with the cognitive foundations necessary to succeed in today’s technology-driven society. The acquisition of CT skills is therefore one of the essential goals of contemporary Computer Science (CS) education. There are many CS curricula, educational software programs and other modalities designed to teach the principles of CT to children. Less attention has been paid to the assessment of CT skills in children, resulting in a relative paucity of validated instruments for measuring the impact of this aspect of CS education on preschool and elementary students. Without such instruments, educators may be hard-pressed to accurately gauge their student's progress in acquiring CT skills or measure the effectiveness of their CS lessons. 

The primary objective of this Special Issue is to present an overview of current progress in developing, validating, and implementing measures of Computational Thinking for children and educators. This includes quantitative and qualitative measures of CT, instruments employing coding or “unplugged” challenges as well as standardized, telemetric and adaptive assessment formats. Contributors are encouraged to present empiric data as well as theory papers on this topic.

Topics of interest to this Special Issue include but are not limited to the following topics as they apply to children and their educators:

• Characterization of instruments for measuring CT skills in children;
• Game-based assessments of CT;
• Adaptive CT assessments;
• Naturalistic CT assessment;
• Telemetric measures of CT;
• CT assessment for children with disabilities;
• Measuring CT skills as they relate to Artificial Intelligence;
• Measuring the impact of child development on CT skills;
• CT assessment in large groups;
• Measuring parent and educator perceptions of CT;
• Measuring the impact of CT skills outside the context of CS.

Dr. Emily Relkin
Dr. María Zapata Cáceres
Guest Editors

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• computational thinking
• children
• assessment
• computer science