Defining the competence of abstract thinking and evaluating CS-students' level of abstraction

Abstract

Although it is commonly agreed that the competence of abstraction and abstract thinking is one of the most important competences in Computer Science, only a few of these sources define this competence and its processes in a precise manner. Furthermore there is a lack of instruments to test the competence of abstract thinking and to integrate it into teaching. This work will start to close the gap concerning the competence of abstract thinking by deriving a theoretical description of the competence construct of abstract thinking, focusing on a Computer Science perspective. Furthermore, we will present a coding manual based on the model, which can be used to evaluate student assignments. This coding manual is applied to examples of our teaching practice in order to demonstrate its validity.