Assessment design patterns for computational thinking practices in secondary computer science: A first look

This report gives an overview of a principled approach to designing assessment tasks that can generate valid evidence of students’ abilities to think computationally. Principled assessment means designing assessment tasks to measure important knowledge and practices by specifying chains of evidence that can be traced from what students do (observable behaviors) to claims about what they know. Our approach to assessment produces documents called design patterns that provide an overview of how tasks can be designed, and a template for designing them, to elicit evidence about a students’ ability in constructs of interest. Design patterns are meant to be generative of multiple tasks and to guide assessment specialists in developing tasks to assess both knowledge and skills in the context of specific learning experiences.

Bienkowski, M., Snow, E., Rutstein, D. W., & Grover, S. (2015). Assessment design patterns for computational thinking practices in secondary computer science: A first look (SRI technical report). Menlo Park, CA: SRI International. Retrieved from http://pact.sri.com/resources.html