Types of Questions in Computer Science Education - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 173

Examples of questions for each of the nine categories are presented in the Rago-
nis and Shilo ( 2013 ).

Activity 76: Test Analysis
This activity can be facilitated in the context of any topic discussed in the
course. As preparation to the activity, the course instructor collects examples
of tests to be used in the group work. Also, Table 9.2 is distributed to the
students.
The students are divided into groups and are asked to analyze the test ques-
tions by examining the cognitive skills a learner needs to apply in order to
solve the questions. In this activity, students are asked to apply their critical
thinking: They can add keywords to the categories and to discuss the differ-
ences between “problem-solving questions” to “non problem-solving ques-
tion.” They can also add a new category.
Discussion can be then facilitated in the course plenary on whether a spe-
cific content influences cognitive demands or not.

9.4 Kinds of Questions

In this section, we present three kinds of questions, which represent a more glob-
al question classification. The first two kinds— story questions and closed ques-
tions— can be applied with respect to most of the 12 types of questions presented in
Sect. 9.2. The third kind of question addresses unsolved problems .

9.4.1 Story Questions

Story questions presented to CS learners can be divided literally into two main
kinds: pure-algorithmic tasks and narrative-algorithmic tasks. Pure-algorithmic
tasks are problems that directly and explicitly address the program structures and
variables, and present the task by using this terminology. Narrative-algorithmic
tasks are problems that neither relate to program structures nor to its variables;
rather, in this kind of questions, the problem to be solved is embedded in a story and
in order to solve the problem, learners should recognize both what is given and what
the target of the problem is. Specifically, learners should decide which elements
included in the question formulation are relevant and which ones are irrelevant, and
based on this decision, to solve the task. Most of the examples presented in the list
of types of questions (Sect. 9.2) are pure-algorithmic tasks where the problem target
is presented explicitly.
Table 9.3 presents three story tasks in two ways: as pure-algorithmic tasks and as
narrative-algorithmic tasks.
It is important to address these two kinds of story questions in the MTCS course,
not only because they are different, but also because they require different prob-