Article Gold Open Access 2022

Developing a pedagogical evaluation framework for computational thinking supporting technologies and tools

Frontiers in Education
Journal · Vol. 7 · Art. 957739
Abstract

Frameworks for the evaluation of technological instructional tools provide educators with criteria to assess the pedagogical suitability and effectiveness of those tools to address learners’ needs, support teachers’ understanding of learning progress, and recognize the levels of achievement and the learning outcomes of the students. This study applied secondary document analysis and case study to identify five pedagogical indicators for teaching and learning computational thinking, including technology, pedagogical approaches, assessment techniques, data aspect, and teacher professional development. Based on the pedagogical indicators, this study proposed a computational thinking pedagogical assessment framework (CT-PAF) aimed at supporting educators with a strategy to assess the different technological learning tools in terms of pedagogical impact and outcome. Furthermore, three case-study instructional tools for teaching CT in K-12 were analyzed for the initial assessment of CT-PAF. Scratch, Google Teachable Machine, and the iThinkSmart minigames were marched to the underpinning characteristics and attributes of CT-PAF to evaluate the framework across the instructional tools. The initial assessment of CT-PAF indicates that the framework is suitable for the intended purpose of evaluating technological instructional tools for pedagogical impact and outcome. A need for expanded assessment is, therefore, necessary to further ascertain the relevance of the framework in other cases. © © 2022 Oyelere, Agbo and Sanusi.

Keywords

Author Keywords

Instructional tools Machine Learning Computational thinking evaluation framework Scratch Google Teachable Machine iThinkSmart minigames

Index Keywords

Author Affiliations
Department of Computer Science, Luleå University of Technology, Lulea, Norrbotten, Sweden
Faculty of Science and Forestry, Itä-Suomen yliopisto, Kuopio, IS, Finland, School of Computing and Data Science, Willamette University, Salem, OR, United States
Faculty of Science and Forestry, Itä-Suomen yliopisto, Kuopio, IS, Finland
Funding & Acknowledgements
Luleå Tekniska Universitet, LTU
Grant: 8751190
References 10 References
1 Bringing AI into the Classroom, (2019)
2 Adler, Ralph W., Student-led and teacher-led case presentations: Empirical evidence about learning styles in an accounting course, Accounting Education, 13, 2, pp. 213-229, (2004)
3 Agassi, Adam, Scratch nodes ML: A playful system for children to create gesture recognition classifiers, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, (2019)
4 Co Designing A Smart Learning Environment to Facilitate Computational Thinking Education in the Nigerian Context, (2022)
5 Agbo, Friday Joseph, A systematic review of computational thinking approach for programming education in higher education institutions, ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, (2019)
6 Agbo, Friday Joseph, Scientific production and thematic breakthroughs in smart learning environments: a bibliometric analysis, Smart Learning Environments, 8, 1, (2021)
7 Agbo, Friday Joseph, Examining theoretical and pedagogical foundations of computational thinking in the context of higher education, Proceedings - Frontiers in Education Conference, FIE, 2021-October, (2021)
8 Agbo, Friday Joseph, Co-design of mini games for learning computational thinking in an online environment, Education and Information Technologies, 26, 5, pp. 5815-5849, (2021)
9 21st Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research, (2021)
10 Indian Journal of Science and Technology, (2019)
Quick Actions
Full Text via DOI
Citation Metrics
16
Times Cited (Scopus)

References 10
Document Identifiers