Defining Computational Thinking using Semantic Analysis of Prior Definitions

With the inclusion of computational thinking (CT) into various curricula to prepare students for college and career readiness, the definition of what CT is and how it can be taught and assessed has gained great importance.Despite various definitions of CT that have since been presented, many aspects of CT are not clearly defined or understood, including its relationship (a) to other cognitive constructs, such as problem solving and algorithmic thinking; (b) to underlying thought processes and skills, such as abstraction or generalization; and (c) to operational objects for assessment, such as loops, variables, or sequences.
The goal of this research was thus to create a general, domain-independent, yet operational, definition of CT, which can easily be adapted to other applications and research. The resulting definition is envisioned to form the basis for the derivation of reliable and valid measures for the assessment of CT and its related constructs.
Out of a total of 82 CT-related publications, we found 29 publications with original definitions of CT, which we semantically analyzed to arrive at our definition of CT: Computational thinking is a set of processes that require a set of skills (modeling, abstraction, decomposition, algorithm design and use, evaluation, and generalization) which are used to represent and solve problems in a form that can effectively be carried out by an information-processing agent.
This poster will present the methodology of semantic analysis to arrive at our definition of computational thinking, as well as the evaluation of the definition using term-frequency analysis.