The role of evidence centered design and participatory design in a playful assessment for computational thinking about data

Abstract

The K-12 CS Framework provides guidance on what concepts and practices students are expected to know and demonstrate within different grade bands. For these guidelines to be useful in CS education, a critical next step is to translate the guidelines to explicit learning targets and design aligned instructional tools and assessments. Our research and development goal in this paper is to design a playful, curriculum-neutral assessment aligned with the Data and Analysis' concept (grades 6-8) from the CS framework. Using Evidence Centered Design and Participatory Design, we present a set of assessment guidelines for assessing data and analysis, as well as a set of design considerations for integrating data and analysis across middle school curricula in CS and non-CS contexts. We outline these contributions, describe how they were applied to the development of a game-based formative assessment for data and analysis, and present preliminary findings on student understanding and challenges inferred from student gameplay.