Measuring Computational Thinking Self-Efficacy (CT-SEI): Instrument development and preliminary evaluation
2026-07-20 • Computers and Society
Computers and Society
AI summaryⓘ
The authors developed a survey to measure how confident college students feel about their Computational Thinking (CT) skills, like making solutions and checking them. They started with many questions and used expert feedback and student responses to narrow them down. Statistical tests showed the questions grouped into two main types: creating solutions and evaluating solutions. This survey can help teachers understand and improve students' confidence in CT skills after more testing.
Computational ThinkingSelf-efficacyHigher EducationAbstractionAlgorithmic ThinkingDecompositionPrincipal Component AnalysisConfirmatory Factor AnalysisSkill Assessment
Authors
Imke de Jong, Johan Jeuring, Judith Masthoff
Abstract
Much effort is put into helping students at different educational levels develop Computational Thinking (CT) skills. Self-efficacy is important for skill development. It can predict perseverance, engagement and success on educational tasks. We created an instrument to measure self-efficacy of students in higher education for the CT skills abstraction, algorithmic thinking, decomposition, evaluation and generalization. First, 91 candidate items were created by including, adapting and extending items found in the literature. These items were evaluated by experts in the field of CT and education. 54 items remained and to reduce the number of items further, data was collected from 270 students in higher education recruited both through Prolific and a university setting in Costa Rica. Through principle component analysis (PCA) using a subset of 200 responses, the number of items was reduced to 27. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using the remaining responses in the dataset showed the items can be divided into two categories: (1) creating the solution and (2) evaluating the solution. The created instrument can be valuable when assessing CT self-efficacy of students in higher education. With additional validation (e.g. examination of test-retest validity), we believe the scale could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, or decide what interventions should be provided to foster CT skill development.