BDSI: A Validated Concept Inventory For Basic Data Structures

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

2019

Published In

Proceedings Of The 2019 ACM Conference On International Computing Education Research

Abstract

A Concept Inventory (CI) is a validated assessment to measure student conceptual understanding of a particular topic. This work presents a CI for Basic Data Structures (BDSI) and the process by which the CI was designed and validated. We discuss: 1) the collection of faculty opinions from diverse institutions on what belongs on the instrument, 2) a series of interviews with students to identify their conceptions and misconceptions of the content, 3) an iterative design process of developing draft questions, conducting interviews with students to ensure the questions on the instrument are interpreted properly, and collecting faculty feedback on the questions themselves, and 4) a statistical evaluation of final versions of the instrument to ensure its internal validity. We also provide initial results from pilot runs of the CI.

Published By

Association For Computing Machinery

Conference

ICER '19: International Computing Education Research Conference

Conference Dates

August 12-14, 2019

Conference Location

Toronto, Canada

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