Page 106 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

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Chapter 5
(Krathwohl, 2002) with SOLO in order to construct assessment for programming tasks of novice programmers, they started out with the interpretation of SOLO as five ordered categories:
• Prestructural: Mentioning or using unconnected and unorganized bits of information which make no sense.
• Unistructural: A local perspective — mainly one item or aspect is used or emphasized. Others are missed, and no significant connections are made.
• Multistructural: A multi-point perspective — several relevant items or aspects are used or acknowledged, but significant connections are missed and a whole picture is not yet formed.
• Relational: A holistic perspective — meta-connections are grasped. The significance of parts with respect to the whole is demonstrated and appreciated.
• Extended abstract: Generalization and transfer — the context is seen as one instance of a general case (Meerbaum-Salant et al., 2013)
The issue of assessing the learning of the students engaged in larger programming projects attracts attention as well. Casto and Fisler (2017) explored how to track program design skills through an entire CS1 course at university level and suggest a multi-strand SOLO taxonomy, thus corroborating the idea that using SOLO taxonomy simultaneously for various types of activities is not straightforward. They suggest a multi-strand SOLO-taxonomy without the extended abstract level since none of the students in their study reached that level (Castro & Fisler, 2017). A multi-strand SOLO taxonomy is in line with the idea that one assessment task might address several ILO’s and vice versa, one ILO might be addressed by several assessment tasks (Biggs & Tang, 2011). Assignments for complex tasks encompassing diverse ILO’s — such as in case of Computational Science, thus going through a modeling cycle by formulating a problem, pinpointing the research question, designing a model and using it to answer the research question — warrant the elaboration of criteria defining performance for each of the ILO’s involved.