Using SOLO to Classify the Programming Responses of Primary Grade Students
Linda M. Seiter · 2015
This paper presents an assessment designed to measure computational thinking skills of fourth grade students. The students in two public schools were given a set of Scratch programming challenges. The SOLO taxonomy was used to classify student programming responses based on the degree of understanding of the problem structure. The majority of fourth grade students from one school demonstrated the ability to synchronize the costume and motion of a single character sprite, as well as synchronize a basic conversation between multiple sprites. However, they struggled to integrate motion and costume changes into a multi-sprite conversation. The majority of fourth grade students from the second school, where reading and math comprehension scores fall below the state minimum requirements for proficiency, were unable to demonstrate a basic understanding of the programming tasks. The results suggest that fourth grade students who read at grade level are capable of understanding the relationships between multiple concerns within a single script, along with synchronizing a single concern across multiple scripts, but are challenged when synchronizing multiple concerns across multiple scripts.