ABSTRACT
High-order thinking is a capability that in the 21st century should be owned by every graduate of a college. Computational thinking concerns how to solve the problem with an approach which uses the principles of computer science. The purpose of this research is to apply the concept of computational thinking into the teaching/learning process and produce an assessment model of computational thinking. Computational thinking is a new way to solve problems and can be taught through programming of the visual language Scratch. The basic ideas of computational thinking are: 1) a way of solving problems and designing systems; 2) how to use various abstractions, understand and solve the problems more effectively; and 3) think in algorithms and use the concept of mathematics to solve the problems with more convincing results. The concepts of computational thinking as taught through the visual programming language Scratch are: sequence, variable, conditional, iteration, and procedure. The easiest of these to learn is sequence, while the most elusive concept is procedure. Students’ programming abilities consist of two domains, namely, mastery of programming theory and programming practice. The first ability is measured by multiple-choice items, while the second is measured by performance assessment items. To obtain a composite score, the raw scores of multiple-choice and performance assessment are converted to a scaled score.
