"Development and Preliminary Validation of the Assessment of Computing for Elementary Students (ACES)"

Postdoctoral Scholar Miranda Parker (first author), Project Manager Dana Saito-Stehberger, Professor Emerita Debra Richardson, and Professor Mark Warschauer published an article in the Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education on computational thinking. 

​The title of the article is “Development and Preliminary Validation of the Assessment of Computing for Elementary Students (ACES).”
 
Co-authors are Yvonne Kao (WestEd), Associate Professor Diana Franklin (University of Chicago), and Susan Krause (The Learn Academy).
 
Parker’s research is in computer science education, with interests in the topics of assessment, achievement, and access. She is working with Professor Warschauer in UCI’s Digital Learning Lab. Her dissertation research focused on questions of access and barriers to computer science courses at the high school level within the state of Georgia. During her doctoral studies, Parker was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a Georgia Tech President’s Fellow, interned with Code.org, and worked on the K-12 Computer Science Framework.
 

Miranda Parker

​Abstract
 
As reliance on technology increases in practically every aspect of life, all students deserve the opportunity to learn to think computationally from early in their educational experience. To support the kinds of computer science curriculum and instruction that makes this possible, there is an urgent need to develop and validate computational thinking (CT) assessments for elementary-aged students. We developed the Assessment of Computing for Elementary Students (ACES) to measure the CT concepts of loops and sequences for students in grades 3-5. The ACES includes block-based coding questions as well as non-programming, Bebras-style questions. We conducted cognitive interviews to understand student perspectives while taking the ACES. We piloted the assessment with 57 4th grade students who had completed a CT curriculum. Preliminary analyses indicate acceptable reliability and appropriate difficulty and discrimination among assessment items. The significance of this paper is to present a new CT measure for upper elementary students and to share its intentional development process.