The applications of machine learning in computational thinking assessments: a scoping review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background and Context Computational thinking (CT) has been increasingly added to K-12 curricula, prompting teachers to grade more and more CT artifacts. This has led to a rise in automated CT assessment tools.Objective This study examines the scope and characteristics of publications that use machine learning (ML) approaches to assess students’ CT competencies from four perspectives: the educational context in which the assessments were implemented, the data used to train and validate ML algorithms, the specific ML algorithms used, and the aspects of CT assessed.Method The PRISMA approach and Arksey and O’Malley’s methodological framework for scoping reviews were adopted to search and screen studies.Findings ML algorithms have been increasingly used to assess CT competencies. However, this study identified several research gaps in the literature: existing studies were mostly conducted in the context of programming or other learning activities related to computing science; datasets used by the ML algorithms were generally small; the most frequently used algorithms were regression techniques, naive Bayes, neural networks, clustering, and natural language processing, whereas no studies used reinforcement learning; and CT competencies were not comprehensively assessed.Implications The applications of ML in CT assessments have the potential to enable personalized learning, improve assessment validity, reduce the workload of graders, and gain insights from large datasets by uncovering complex and subtle patterns.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.055 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.021 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".