The K12 Computer Science Framework was recently released (https://k12cs.org/), but contains limited support for teachers to assess the target practices. How can/should CS teachers, particularly at the secondary level, align their assessment practices with the Framework?

Thank you for sharing your work on assessing computational thinking. It is addressing an important gap in a rapidly developing area of K-12 education. I will definitely look into more information on your website and am eager to see the assessment tasks.

I'd be interested in knowing if any of your assessments have been used outside the ECS curriculum, or the extent to which you think that could be used as is, or in modified form, to assess computational thinking more generally.

Assessment is easily one of the more difficult tasks that a teacher will face. I viewed the Unit-2 ECS assessment and was pleased to note that they require the students to write how they got their answers. Having students justify their thinking with writing is so much more powerful than just filling in an scantron multiple choice test. Do you have a community of practice in which teachers create and share assessments that they write?

I love that you're building this tool for teachers. Considering that you're doing this work with students of color who have been disenfranchised, I'd love to hear more about how you're considering race/culture and issues related to SES. I love the work you're doing but I would love to hear more about how you're involving community members to inform the research and how you're addressing needs specific to students of color. You have my vote! Good luck!

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on computational thinking and being aware that there are students who have not had access to computer science in their schools.  Helping students be producers and be able to use computational thinking practices to solve a variety of problems is what will help them in school, outside of school and their career.

It is nice that there are both paper and online tests available for students to take.  Have you noticed any differences in scores when students who haven't had a lot of access to computers take the online assessments vs paper? 

Another question I have is what are the types of features built into the online testing that assess the students answers?  If they are particular vocabulary words, or other items - are teachers scaffolding discussions or activity wrap ups to make sure they are using those vocabularies and concepts so that students are able to naturally use such in their explanations?

I've been following the work of this project for quite some time now and it's been wonderful to see such great progress with helping to define computational thinking more clearly through these assessments, both in paper-pencil and online formats. One thing that caught my attention was Mr. Redhill's testimonial on how the knowledge that he's gained has increased his self-confidence as a teacher and has observed growth in his students by leaps and bounds. For me, this is golden --- that teacher efficacy can be increased via these assessments. Perhaps, it's in learning more about the content that the assessments are targeting and pedagogy that best supports student achievement that are factored in this type of teacher development. Does your project have more data/information on the impact of teacher knowledge gained on student achievement? If so, how is teacher knowledge of the assessments connected to how students perform on the assessments? 

This is such valuable work. Thanks for sharing. I realize that this was designed around the ESC curriculum, but it sounds like it is broad enough that it could potentially be adapted for use in other cases where CT assessments were needed. One question is that while ESC is primarily a high school course, do you think this PACT assessment could be used with younger grades (middle school, or even earlier) as this type of course is increasingly being implemented with younger students?