This work-in-progress paper reports on the establishment of preliminary reliability for a domain-agnostic evidence-centered assessment model to measure computational thinking (CT) in an online virtual world. Preliminary reliability was established between two researchers through manually coding 800 minutes of recorded learning sessions and over 350 minutes of consultation. Participants were three adolescents diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Findings indicate an acceptable level of reliability between the two coders, opening the way to more extensive application of the model in future studies.

In this work-in-progress research we exploited and investigated a virtual reality (VR) based, flexibility learning environment (FLE) in which adolescents with autism use, customize, and design an assortment of simulation games that represent and exemplify the application of forces and Newton's laws of motion. The simulation/game modeling and making tasks acted as the primers of practicing and assessing representational flexibility in solving the engineering design problems with computational thinking. The participants' participation behaviors and verbal utterances during the intervention sessions have been archived via screen and webcam recordings. The current study findings indicated that two approaches of speech or text data mining, multi-label classification and similarity index, can act as the in-situ performance assessment methods to evaluate the representational flexibility development for engineering design and computational thinking of a heterogeneous learner group.

The purpose of this paper is to identify central issues regarding user interactions in a virtual environment for immersive learning. This preliminary argument explores the importance of categorization to match with cognitive domains and natural user interfaces in the immersive virtual environment. An example of applying immersive virtual environment (IVE) in cognitive domains is provided. The research idea will help practitioners in advanced learning technologies to design a virtual platform aligning with instructional goals.