TASKS FOR ASSESSING SKILLS OF COMPUTATIONAL THINKING

In today's modernizing world, computer science has become an important part of many disciplines and thinking computationally has come to be an essential skill for everyone. Recent years have seen a rise of interest in developing computational thinking (CT) already at comprehensive school level. Wing has defined CT as "the thought processes involved in formulating problems and their solutions so that the solutions are represented in a form that can be effectively carried out by an information processing agent". Systematic development of CT includes incorporating thought processes that utilize abstraction, decomposition, algorithmic thinking, evaluation, and generalizations. Tasks of the Bebras challenge on informatics have been suggested as part of an instrument to assess those five skills of CT, but this instrument has not been empirically tested. The goal of this study is to test empirically which skills of CT from the Bebras challenge results are well distinguishable. Although five factors were expected to describe five skills of computational thinking assessed in the Bebras challenge, the confirmatory factor analysis did not support that theory. Therefore, exploratory factor analysis with principal axis factoring was used with the Oblimin rotation and Kaiser normalization. Results from 7100 participants of the Bebras challenge, at the age of 11-12 (grade 5-6, Benjamins), show two main factors emerging, which can be characterized as algorithmic thinking (includes mainly tasks of algorithmic patterns and decomposition) and pattern recognition (includes mainly tasks of abstraction, generalization and evaluation). Tasks describing the factors are presented in the paper. The Bebras challenge tasks are rather complex, usually integrating various skills of CT, which leads to the idea of deconstructing the tasks in the future by forming new, smaller but more skill specific tasks. Considering the current lack of a systematic approach to assess the development of the skills of CT, this work contributes to that topic.