Resources for the Praxis CS Test

Question

Current middle school/high school teachers in my state who want to obtain an additional license to teach computer science (notably AP CSP/CS A) must pass the Praxis computer science test (5651). I'm looking for study materials, particularly in two areas:

1. Additional practice tests that are aligned with the content areas covered by the test. For example, one subarea is about CS pedagogy, and I would be interested in seeing more questions in that category.
2. Resources that cover the coding/data structures component in pseudocode (what Praxis uses) rather than a specific language.

Answer 1

This is not an answer.

I see what you mean, looking at: https://www.ets.org/s/praxis/pdf/5651.pdf

They have an example:

// precondition 1: A is an array
// precondition 2: The length of array A is n.

but then they have a for loop over the array that looks very c like:

for (int j=1; j<= n-1; j = j + 1)

then they assign

int temp = A[j]

Now if I assume this is C-like, I just skipped the first element, if I assume this is Pascal-like, then I have the first element.

So this can be difficult to wrap your head around when you are in an exam situation. It does seem that they are trying very hard not to trick you, using the comments and such. But it would be pretty easy to ask, "Does this function correctly caclulate..." and then give you options of (A) Yes, (B) Errors and you really have to look around for how this thing is supposed to work in the first place.

I also can say that it is a little bit annoying to have to wonder if they are going to use other strange nomenclature for other functions in the code, for example how do they do exponents? (x^2, or something else?), how about mod? I'm sure there are more things to worry about.

Good luck!