Search for: All records

Planning a path from an origin to a destination is a common task for studying children’s spatial thinking and a foundational part of many early programming environments. This paper examines children’s means of abstraction between the grid space and the program domain through an exploration of the strategies they used to plan a robot’s routes in 2-D space. Qualitative analysis focused on ways children used materials to aid in spatial planning and programming, advancing previous work on material anchors for concepts (Hutchins, 2005). Through an elaboration of several path planning strategies, we illustrate how children varied in their use of materials in space to represent a path-program relationship. We argue that these strategies represent multiple ways of contextualizing and abstracting in a programming task, with implications for design of equitable CT assessments in early childhood. 

Many coding environments for young children involve using navigational arrow codes representing four movements: forward, backwards, rotate left, and rotate right. Children interpreting these four, seemingly simple codes encounter a complex interaction of spatial thinking and semantic meaning. In this study of how children interpret directional arrows, we found that they interpret each of the arrows as encoding many meanings and that the orientation of the agent plays a critical role in children’s interpretations. Through iterative rounds of qualitative coding and drawing on two examples, we unpack some common interpretations. 

With growing interest in supporting the development of computational thinking (CT) in early childhood, there is also need for new assessments that serve multiple purposes and uses. In particular, there is a need to understand the design of formative assessments that can be used during classroom instruction to provide feedback to teachers and children in real-time. In this paper, we report on an empirical study and advance a new unit of observational analysis for formative assessment that we call an indicator of a knowledge refinement opportunity or as a shorthand , KRO indicators . We put forth a new framework for conceptualizing the design of formative assessments that builds on the Evidence Centered Design framework but centers identification and analysis of indicators of knowledge refinement opportunities. We illustrate a number of key indicators through empirical examples drawn from video recordings of Kindergarten classroom lessons. 

Classroom environments have been hot spots for studies of conversational “floor maintenance,” or the ways in which people establish interactional rights and obligations through turn-taking or topical cohesion. We know less about how the physical floor of interaction is negotiated when activities literally take place on the floor, as in Kindergarten classrooms. In floor-based learning activities, body movements, body positions, and proximity are key modalities for establishing rights and obligations for participating in tasks. This paper analyzes video of Kindergarteners engaged in a floor-based learning activity, where children moved around and positioned themselves (and others) to participate. We found that while children often leaned in to the task-space, there were occasions where they sat back, but were nonetheless productive. Referring to these latter forms of participation as “zones of productive exclusion,” we analyze how body positioning indexed children’s rights and obligations in-task. We discuss implications for analyses of the powered relations between differently-positioned bodies. 

Performance assessments can provide meaningful insights into young children's knowledge; however, documenting assessment responses as incorrect or correct limits our understanding of students’ abilities. One method of improving our ability to measure student understanding is by documenting the strategies students use to engage with assessment tasks. In this study, we describe how purposeful assessment design can provide insight into students’ thinking by qualitatively examining how students solve performance assessment items using multimodal strategies. 

If we want to design for computer science learning in K12 education, then Kindergarten is the place to start. Despite differing formats, early childhood coding tools rely heavily on a similar representational infrastructure. Grids and arrows predominate, introducing a nested series of directional symbols and spatial skills children must learn in order to code. Thus, learning to think computationally is entangled with learning to think spatially and symbolically. This paper analyzes video of Kindergarten students learning to use robot coding toys and examines how they navigated programming’s representational infrastructure. We found that children drew on conventional notions of how objects move, creating a “conceptual blend” for programming robot routes (Fauconnier & Turner, 1998). We argue that coding in Kindergarten requires mapping a series of correspondences from the domain of everyday movements onto the resources available in the representational domain.