Analysis of Introductory Physics Computational Thinking Assessment with Classical Test Theory

Computational thinking (CT) in physics is important both because physicists recognize computation as a third pillar of the discipline along with theory and experimentation, and because physicists believe that CT will serve as an important skill for students' future careers. To contribute to the definition of CT in physics and help instructors evaluate their computationally integrated introductory physics courses, we have been developing a CT assessment to add to PhysPort. In this talk we present an analysis of an assessment of CT for introductory physics using classical test theory. Our assessment was administered in the Fall of 2023 by four different instructors as a pre- and post- multiple-choice assessment. In total there were 1,134 responses to the pre- and 964 responses to the post-. We will characterize the factor structure of the assessment, and report on the mean score, item difficulty and discrimination, Cronbach's alpha, and learning gains from the preliminary administration of the assessment.