Dissemination | Assist CS

2025

Basu, S., Yang, H., Rachmatullah, A., Tate, C., & Rutstein, D. (2025, March). Using Formative Assessment to Examine Student Understanding of Middle School Algorithms and Programming Concepts. To appear in Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE).

This paper presents findings from over 100 middle students’ responses to the ASSIST formative assessments related to four CS standards from the algorithms and programming strand. The study findings reveal that students demonstrated a limited understanding of the standards. These findings contribute to the growing literature on middle school students’ understanding of algorithms and programming and provide insights that can inform CS teacher development, instruction, and curriculum design.

Tate, C., Basu, S., Rachmatullah, A., Yang, H., & Rutstein, D. (2025, February). Implementing Standards-Focused Professional Development for Middle School CS Teachers: An Experience Report. In Proceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (pp. 1113-1119), Pittsburgh, PA, USA. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641554.3701908

This experience report presents findings from PD observations and exit surveys, teacher interviews, and teacher responses to a survey assessing CS pedagogical content knowledge related to four teachers’ standard-aligned PD experience. The findings revealed the complexity of using content standards as a driver of high-quality CS instruction at the middle school level and reinforced our position that more standards-focused PD is needed.

2024

Basu, S., Yang, H., Rachmatullah, A., & Tate, C. (2024, July). Using Formative Assessments to Diagnose Student Challenges with Middle School CS Programming Standards. Breakout session at 2024 Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) conference, Las Vegas, USA.

This interactive session provided CS teachers with unpacking documents and formative assessments related to two standards: 2-AP-11 about variables and 2-AP-12 about combined control structures. Teachers received access to the classroom-tested formative assessment tasks and rubrics aligned with these two standards and had the opportunity to practice interpreting student work with the provided tasks and rubrics.

Rutstein, D., Basu, S., Yang, H., Rachmatullah, A., & Tate, C., (2024, March). Middle School CS Curriculum and Standards Alignment. Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2 (pp. 1084-1085), Portland, OR, USA. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3626253.3635546

This paper presents the process of mapping one widely used middle school CS curriculum to a few CS standards and discusses key findings. The significance of this paper is to demonstrate the process and methods involved in examining how well CS curricula align with specific aspects of CS standards.

Rachmatullah, A., Tate, C., Basu, S., Rutstein, D., Yang, H., Alozie, N., & Ortiz, C. (2024, April). Using standards-based professional development to support middle school CS teachers. Paper presented at the annual conference of American Educational Research Association (AERA), Philadelphia, PA, USA.

This presentation reports on two teachers’ perceptions of the ASSIST PD and its effects. Findings revealed that teachers did not initially view standards as essential to their teaching but eventually advocated for making standards-based PD compulsory.

Rutstein, D., Basu, S., Yang, H., Rachmatullah A., Tate, C., & McGee, S. (2024, June). Using an Evidence-Centered Design Approach to Examine the Alignment of Computer Science Curricula with Standards. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), Buffalo, NY, USA. https://repository.isls.org/bitstream/1/11116/1/ICLS2024_394-401.pdf

This paper illustrates our process of decomposing five middle school CS standards into granular learning targets using an evidence-centered design approach and mapping the learning targets onto individual lessons from one widely popular middle school CS curriculum. The findings have potential implications on curriculum design, curriculum selection, and teacher professional learning.

Basu, S., Rachmatullah A., Tate, C. Rutstein, D., & Yang, H. (2024, June). Middle School CS Teachers’ Perceptions of Standards-Focused PD. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), Buffalo, NY, USA. https://repository.isls.org/bitstream/1/10898/1/ICLS2024_2129-2130.pdf

This paper presents teachers’ perceptions of standards-focused PD and its effects. Findings indicate that teachers did not initially view standards as essential to their teaching, but those who persisted through PD eventually advocated for making standards-focused PD compulsory for all CS teachers.

2023

Basu, S., Rutstein, D., Tate, C., Rachmatullah, A., Yang, H. & Ortiz, C. (2023). Exploring Middle School Students’ Understanding of Algorithms Using Standards‐Aligned Formative Assessments: Teacher and Researcher Perspectives. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), Montreal, Québec, Canada. https://repository.isls.org/bitstream/1/9863/1/ICLS2023_114-121.pdf

This paper presents findings from a small-scale classroom study, especially on students’ understanding of algorithms through their responses to our standards-aligned formative assessment tasks. We further discuss how teachers and researchers interpreted student responses differently, even when using the same rubrics. Our study underscores the importance of carefully designed standards-aligned formative assessment tasks for monitoring student progress and demonstrates the need for teacher content knowledge to effectively use formative assessments during CS instruction.

Basu, S., Rutstein, D., Rachmatullah, A., Tate, C., Yang, H., & Ortiz, C. (2023, April). Designing Standards-Aligned Formative Assessments to Explore Middle School Students’ Understanding of Algorithms. Paper presented at the annual conference of American Educational Research Association (AERA), Chicago, IL, USA.

This paper describes an approach to decompose the broad middle-school ‘algorithms’ standard into finer-grained learning targets, develop formative assessment tasks aligned with the fine-grained learning targets, and use the tasks to explore student understanding of and challenges with the various concepts underlying the standard. We present a number of student challenges revealed by our analysis of student responses to a set of standards-aligned formative assessment tasks.

Yang, H., Basu, S., Rutstein, D., Rachmatullah, A., Tate, C., Ortiz, C., & Rulifson, E. (2023). Uncovering Middle School CS Students’ Understanding of Variables and Control Structures: A Cognitive Think-Aloud Approach. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), Montreal, Québec, Canada. https://repository.isls.org/bitstream/1/10201/1/ICLS2023_2139-2140.pdf

This poster presents findings on middle school students’ understanding of core Computer Science (CS) concepts on variables and control structures, using cognitive think-aloud interviews with eight students. This study describes students’ interpretations of the CS concepts and discusses potential factors influencing student interpretations.

2022

Basu, S., Rutstein, D., Tate, C., Rachmatullah, A., & Yang, H. (2022). Standards-Aligned Instructional Supports to Promote Computer Science Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge. Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (pp. 404-410), Providence, RI, USA. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3478431.3499403

This position paper advocates supporting CS teacher professional learning by supplementing existing curriculum-specific teacher PD with standards-aligned PD focused on teachers’ conceptual understanding of CS standards and ability to adapt instruction based on student understanding of concepts underlying the CS standards.

Basu, S., Rutstein, D., Tate, C., Rachmatullah, A., & Yang, H. (2022). Design considerations for a middle school computer science pedagogical content knowledge instrument. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), Hiroshima, Japan. https://repository.isls.org/bitstream/1/9035/1/ICLS2022_2176-2177.pdf

In this poster paper, we describe the design of a computer science pedagogical content knowledge (CS-PCK) instrument for ‘Algorithms and Programming’ that measures three broad constructs: (a) teachers’ understanding of standards and standards-alignment, (b) teachers’ formative assessment practices, and (c) teachers’ self-efficacy for teaching and assessing CS.

Basu, S., Rutstein, D., Tate, C., Rachmatullah, A., & Yang, H. (2022, April). Supporting middle school computer science teachers using standards-aligned educative resources. Paper presented at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), San Diego, CA, USA.

This paper is grounded in systematic literature reviews of CS teaching challenges and presents our approach of contributing to and validating this literature through a focus group exploring middle school teachers’ awareness and use of CS standards and their instructional and assessment practices related to CS. In this paper, we advocate for the importance of our standards-aligned ASSIST teacher resources and associated teacher PD as important supplements to existing curriculum-specific CS PD.