  Computational thinking has been a recent focus of education research within
the sciences. However, there is a dearth of scholarly literature on how best to
teach and to assess this topic, especially in disciplinary science courses.
Physics classes with computation integrated into the curriculum are a fitting
setting for investigating computational thinking. In this paper, we lay the
foundation for exploring computational thinking in introductory physics
courses. First, we review relevant literature to synthesize a set of potential
learning goals that students could engage in when working with computation. The
computational thinking framework that we have developed features 14 practices
contained within 6 different categories. We use in-class video data as
existence proofs of the computational thinking practices proposed in our
framework. In doing this work, we hope to provide ways for teachers to assess
their students' development of computational thinking, while also giving
physics education researchers some guidance on how to study this topic in
greater depth.
