Assessment of Computational Thinking: A Study of Preservice Teachers’ Knowledge and Beliefs

Aiming to bridge the gap in the field of computational thinking and computing education, this study examines preservice teachers’ knowledge of and self-efficacy related to CT assessment. It also develops a reliable instrument to understand the construct of teacher assessment of CT. Specifically, the research questions focus on investigating the extent of preservice teachers’ knowledge and level of self-efficacy of CT assessment, and identifying the difference between demographic variables on teacher knowledge and self-efficacy related to CT assessment. Adopting a cross-sectional survey design, the participants were 182 preservice teachers. Both descriptive statistics and Exploratory Factor Analysis were used to analyze the data. The results show that the preservice teachers know little about how to use CT assessment to help students, and they believe they know even less about using specific assessment techniques to accomplish assessment. Keywords: computational thinking, assessment, teacher knowledge, teacher self-efficacy