A Normative Analysis of the TechCheck Computational Thinking Assessment

TechCheck is an assessment of Computational Thinking (CT) for early elementary school children consisting of fifteen developmentally appropriate unplugged challenges that probe six CT domains. The first version of TechCheck showed good psychometric properties as well as ease of administration and scoring in a validation cohort of 768 children between 5 and 9 years of age. To increase sensitivity and reduce possible ceiling and floor effects, grade-specific versions of TechCheck (K, 1, 2) were subsequently created. In the present study, we explored how CT skills could be compared across grades when grade-specific versions of TechCheck are administered. First, we examined TechCheck raw score distributions and responses within CT domains in a representative sample of students from the three grades. Grade-specific Z-scores and percentile rankings were then calculated. To show utility of this normalization system, we used percentiles to compare CT outcomes between first and second graders who participated in a ScratchJr coding educational intervention. While TechCheck change scores suggested an unexpected 42.74% difference in CT outcomes between first and second grade, application of the normative scoring system indicated a more plausible 5.17 percentile rank difference between grades. Normative analysis may provide a more meaningful way to compare results across grades when grade-specific versions of TechCheck are used. Implications for the future use of the TechCheck CT assessments are discussed.