Assessment feedback: A tool to promote scientific practices in upper-division

Abstract

Students' scores on assessments play a vital role in course modifications, though their effectiveness relies on the quality of the interpretation of these scores. We adapt the notion of assessments as a change agent so that a well-developed rubric accompanied by intentionally designed instructor feedback can act as a tool to inform course improvement. In conjunction with work developing a standardized upper-division thermal physics assessment, this pilot work articulates a methodology to determine feedback for instructors to inform how well their courses support students in meeting learning goals. In this paper, we present an example using a task targeting the scientific practice of "using mathematics" to explicate this methodology. This work highlights the importance of assessment feedback to inform explicit course modifications in physics.

Assessing Scientific Practices in Physics Paper-based Assessments

“…This work also informs our on-going work of developing a new standardized assessment for upper-division thermal physics -The Thermal and Statistical Physics Assessment (TaSPA). In particular, the work presented in this paper informs the assessment tasks and the associated feedback for instructors in-development based on students' responses to these tasks [23].…”

“…In this paper, we build on work by Harris et al, and Stephenson et al to design assessment tasks that address scientific practices by leveraging principles of Evidence-Centered Design and to validate them for their potential to elicit expected evidence [13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. The existing work on designing assessment tasks to assess scientific practices using Evidence-Centered Design covers middle school science students [10,11,13,14,20,21], introductory-level chemistry students [16], and upper-division physics students [22,23]. We fill the gap in the literature by introducing a theory-driven methodology adopting Evidence-Centered Design to assess scientific practices in physics paper-based assessments at introductory-level.…”

Applying Voting Theory to Mastery Grading; A Study of Faculty Interpretation of Course-Level Categorical-Score Distributions

“…TaSPA was developed with specific attention to how faculty use assessment results to inform changes to their instruction based on theories of self-regulated learning and evidence-centered design (ECD) [2,[5][6][7]. TaSPA evaluates students with respect to their achievement of a learning goal categorically as: "Met"(M), "Partially Met"(P), or "Not Met"(N); referred to together as MPN categories.…”

“…II). Ideally, this allows faculty to more clearly interpret their students' performance [2]. This solution, while potentially allowing us to report results of RBAs in a more useful way, has its own unique challenges; when rating individual students into categorical bins (instead of a continuous score category), how do we generate feedback that meaningfully represents the course as a whole based on a distribution of categorical variables (i.e., how many students achieved, partially achieved, or did not achieve the learning goal)?…”