Assessing Problem Decomposition in CS1 for the GenAI Era

TL;DR

This paper explores methods to assess and teach problem decomposition skills in CS1 students, especially in the context of GenAI, through question design, scaffolding, and visual diagram assessments.

Contribution

It introduces novel assessment questions and strategies, including Question Suites and diagram drawing, tailored for beginner programmers in the GenAI era.

Findings

Questions were well received by students.

Scaffolding improved understanding of problem context.

Open-ended diagrams provided insight into students' decomposition skills.

Abstract

Problem decomposition--the ability to break down a large task into smaller, well-defined components--is a critical skill for effectively designing and creating large programs, but it is often not included in introductory computer science curricula. With the rise of generative AI (GenAI), students even at the introductory level are able to generate large quantities of code, and it is becoming increasingly important to equip them with the ability to decompose problems. There is not yet a consensus among educators on how to best teach and assess the skill of decomposition, particularly in introductory computing. This practitioner paper details the development of questions to assess the skill of problem decomposition, and impressions about how these questions were received by students. A challenge unique to problem decomposition questions is their necessarily lengthy context, and we detail our approach to addressing this problem using Question Suites: scaffolded sequences of questions that help students understand a question's context before attempting to decompose it. We then describe the use of open-ended drawing of decomposition diagrams as another form of assessment. We outline the learning objectives used to design our questions and describe how we addressed challenges encountered in early iterations. We present our decomposition assessment materials and reflections on them for educators who wish to teach problem decomposition to beginner programmers.