Teaching Evaluation for Computational-Thinking-oriented Elementary Computer Courses

With the prevalence1 of the computational thinking, Chinese colleges and universities adopt this concept into their elementary computer teaching for cultivating students' thinking and application ability, which strongly support the students' development. Therefore, it is very important to evaluate the effectiveness of computational thinking in the elementary computer courses. Through such an evaluation, we can obtain the objective data which reflects the teaching effect of elementary computer courses, establish scientific teaching evaluation matrices, and emphasize the importance of those courses. In this paper, we investigate the teaching effectiveness for achieve accurate data and decision support on the computational-thinking-oriented computer curriculum reform. Our research is based on recent evaluations and data acquisition. We analyze the test database, categories of questions, and scores of students. We find several problems, such as the over-emphasizing the programming, incomplete knowledge components, limited background, large deviation of evaluation results among universities. Finally, we give several improvement recommendations.