Here are tools that we have used in assessing media computation classes. You are welcome to borrow these and adapt them for your classes. If you would like to help in adapting these for your classes, please contact Lijun Ni (email@example.com) or Mark Guzdial (firstname.lastname@example.org).
Advice about assessment
Here we list several tools used for different assessment aims. You can adopt them or look for more stuffs from the Library of Asessment Tools for your class.
- Consent form example
- Here is an official,approved consent form used in Spring 2003 nsf-ei-consentform-v2.doc. We provide the whole form here for your referrence.You will need to change the detailed content for your class.
- To begin with,you may use the following documents to do initial survey to understand students' backgrounds and their attitudes about CS.
- If you want to assess students' prior experiences,attitudes and expection, you can use InitialParticipantSurvey.doc. This survey is the latest one we've used. It was developed for use at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). You will need to change the department listing (at least) to tailor it for your school.
- During the semester
- If you want to know how students feel about your class and if they are making progress, you can try MidTermSurvey.doc. We only used this in 2003 at Georgia Tech and Gainesville, in order to get some mid-term sense of whether the experiment of using Media Computation was working at all.
- At the end of the semester, you can use the following surveys:
- To understand how students feel about your class, you can try Fall 2003 draft3b.doc. This one is the ancestor of the others below–it is very detailed, and is fairly specific about Georgia Tech.
- About students' progress and how they feel about the class, you can use finalsurvey-fall2004.doc. This one is the latest one that we've used at Georgia Tech.
- Do an integrative assessment about students' attitude and motivation, acdemic progress and your teaching, use FinalParticipantSurvey.doc. This is the very latest one we've used, at UTEP.
Here's a complete set of a consent form, an initial survey, and a final survey. These were used in Spring 2005 for the initial offering of CS1316, our media computation data structures class. Obviously, these are Georgia Tech specific, but we'd be happy to work with you to make them into ones that will work for your institution.
We did do one follow-up survey, a year after the first offering of CS1315. We would be happy to work with you on modifying these questions for your class. As we mentioned in our design paper on CS1315 (Available on Reports on Using Media Computation), we found that we asked the wrong question here when we asked if the course changed how students used the computer. It was a bad question – most people said "No."(Of course! They still used a mouse and keyboard!) Instead they pointed out how they changed how they thought about the computer.
Library of Assessment Tools
- Initial survey
- Midterm Survey
- Final Survey
Here we list the interview guide we used in Summer 2003 for your referrence.It can be used to asess the change of students' attitudes and Opinions towards Computer Science and the Media Computation class.
- Initial Interviews InterviewGuide.doc(Current opinions towards Computer Science and CS1321 Class).
- Final interviews 1321Final1.doc(Follow up opinions towards Computer Science and CS1321 Class).
Here are some surveys used for measuring computing attitudes in some related researches.
- computer science attitude survey
- ComputerScienceAttitude_Wiebe.pdf from Eric N. Wiebe. (This instrument is derived from Fennema-Sherman mathematics attitudes scales to measure attitudes towards computer programming and computer science in gerneral.It provides clear survey subscales and their survey questions!)
- TeacherAttitude_TCET.pdf(This is combined questionnaire for teachers'attitudes toward computers.It inludes eight parts of questions adopted from different researches about measurement of computer attitudes. Some of them seem to be redundant,but we can get a big picture about computer attitude measure and adpat it for our assessment of students' attitudes toward CS.)
- Townsend_Loyd.pdf (This is Brenda H.Loyd ans Clarice P.Gressard' s survey of attitudes toword learning about and working with computers, which is widely adopted by others.)
- ComputerAnxietyScale.pdf (This one lists several statements for computer anxiety scale and attitudes toward computers.)
- GirlsonTrackSurvey_Math.pdf(This survey is used to track girls' attitudes to advanced math class.)
Assessment Instruments from your schools
Here is the space for you to present the assessment tools used in your Media Computation class.
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