Assessing the computational literacy of elementary students on a national level in Korea

Information and communication technology (ICT) literacy education has become an important issue, and the necessity of computational literacy (CL) has been increasing in our growing information society. CL is becoming an important element for future talents, and many countries, including the USA, are developing programs for CL education. Accordingly, Korea’s Ministry of Education has modified the ICT education program created in 2000. The revised curriculum has emphasized computational thinking and informational ethics since 2007. However, in revising the ICT curriculum, we need to develop a new ICT test tool because the previous tool did not include CL. Thus, we developed a new ICT literacy test tool consisting of fundamental concepts, contemporary skills, and CL. We then carried out a test on 40,072 elementary students nationally. To determine the CL level of students, we used the standard level obtained from ten experts using the Angoff method (1971) and analyzed the difference between the standard level and students’ level in the test. The results showed that students’ CL scores were remarkably lower than their scores on fundamental concepts and contemporary skills. We consequently found that the revised ICT curriculum did not apply to the current ICT education domain, implying that we need to develop a strategy to expand CL to different educational fields, which would help researchers and administrators to measure CL in ICT education.