Graphical Representations to Assess System Performance (GRASP): Assessment for Engineering Education

工程-其他（59）评估/研究（91）系统素养技能是学生理解特定系统如何工作，识别改进或修复该系统的机会，以及更广泛地适应新情况的能力的基础。目前的教学实践建立在这样一种假设之上，即在学习者能够对复杂问题进行建模之前，必须获得基本的数学和科学探究技能，这往往会延迟这些技能的发展。在试点研究中，工科本科生已经展示了接近复杂工程系统的潜力。然而，他们通常缺乏必要的工具来理解这些系统，并注意到组件之间的关系，这些关系解释了系统如何以及为什么按照它的方式执行。这一结论来自于要求学习者生成系统抽象表示的基于表现的评估。绩效评估作为一种测量和发展学习者认知和元认知技能的方法，一直受到重视。由于实施基于绩效的评估的成本很高，本提案的目标是构建一个自动化的动态形成性评估环境，以发展和衡量学生表示、识别和解释复杂问题解决方案的能力。这个系统被称为：“评估系统性能的图形表示”（GRASP）。正在进行的评估学生对复杂系统的概念理解的研究塑造了GRASP的设计。此外，该项目正在开发将工程问题定义为认识形式和规则的方法。这些形式和规则提供了一个代表性的结构，可以用来可靠地评估学生的工作，并在练习期间提供有意义的反馈。智力优势：为GRASP开发的评估系统和体系结构是一个允许用户生成图形、接收快速自动反馈并改进其解决方案的界面。该系统可以提高学生解决问题的初始阶段的能力，并为助教和教师提供机会来评估与结构不良的问题相关的高生成性和认知丰富的活动。更广泛的影响：GRASP旨在扩展学习评估的种类，可以提供给所有年龄段和任何领域的学习者。图形用户界面提供了一种新的方法来评估学生使用图形和语言素养来解释他们对系统概念理解的能力。GRASP很容易与许多商业上可用的学习管理系统集成，因此对大量用户具有吸引力。一旦GRASP被开发出来，它将通过普渡大学的INSPIRE研究所适应K-12的学习环境。

Engineering - Other (59)Assessment/Research (91)System literacy skills are at the foundation of students' abilities to comprehend how a particular system works, to identify opportunities to refine or repair that system, and more generally to adapt to novel situations. Current instructional practices, built on the assumption that basic mathematical and scientific inquiry skills must be obtained before learners can model complex problems, often delay the development of these skills. In pilot studies, undergraduate engineering students have demonstrated the potential for approaching complex engineering systems. However, they typically lack the tools necessary to comprehend these systems and to notice the relationships between components that explain how and why the system performs the way it does. This conclusion follows from performance-based assessments that require learners to generate abstract representations of systems. Performance-based assessment has long been emphasized as a method for measuring and developing both cognitive and meta-cognitive skills of learners. Because the cost of implementing performance-based assessment is high, the goal of this proposal is to construct an automated dynamic formative assessment environment that develops and measures students' ability to represent, identify, and explain solutions to complex problems. This system is called: "Graphical Representations to Assess System Performance" (GRASP). The design of GRASP is being shaped by ongoing research on evaluating students' conceptual understanding of complex systems. In addition, the project is developing methods for defining engineering problems into epistemic forms and rules. These forms and rules provide a representational structure that can be used to reliably evaluate students' work and provide meaningful feedback during practice session. Intellectual merit: The assessment system and architecture being developed for GRASP is an interface that allows users to generate graphics, receive rapid automated feedback, and refine their solutions. This system can increase students' ability to approach initial stages of solving a problem and provide TAs and instructors the opportunity to evaluate the highly generative and cognitively rich activities associated with more ill-structured problems. Broader impact: GRASP is designed to expand the kinds of assessments for learning that can be offered to learners of all ages and in any domain. The graphical user interface provides a new approach to assessing students' ability to explain their conceptual understanding of a system using both graphical and language literacy. GRASP integrates easily with many commercially available Learning Management Systems and thus will be attractive to a large audience of users. Once GRASP is developed, it will be adapted to K-12 learning environments through the INSPIRE Institute at Purdue University.