Relationship between Hands-on and Written Coursework Assessments with Critical Thinking Skills in Structured Programming Course

Learning to program has been challenging to most learners including students at UTP. Not only the learners need to acquire knowledge and understanding of the essential programming concepts, but more importantly they also need to sharpen their critical thinking skills in the form of ability to apply or assimilate these concepts into coding of workable programs which solved arrays of problems. Thus, correct course assessments to measure the level of learners' critical thinking skills for problem solving throughout the learning period is necessary to ensure learners' success at the end of the course. Hence, in this paper, we share our findings when comparing the scores obtained by learners in their hands-on and written coursework assessments for Structured Programming course against their final examination score, which the latter's questions have been categorized according to levels of cognitive Bloom's Taxonomy (BT). Correlation test conducted on the data suggest that there is a correlation between Written assessment and final examination score for all levels of cognitive BT. Regression test further confirms there is a dependency between Written assessment and the final exam score as well. As for Hands-on assessment very weak to almost none correlation is found.