Collaborative Research: Community Implementation: WIDER:Data Explorer and Assessment Resources for Faculty

来自堪萨斯州立大学和美国物理教师协会的合作PI团队正在创建一个全国性的模型，通过基于社区的网络资源来改善STEM高等教育，以帮助物理教师通过将基于研究的教学方法和评估纳入课堂学习来改变他们的教学。认识到高等教育努力寻找评估和改进教学的方法，该项目正在使用一种"自下而上"的方法，其中基于学科的教师/研究人员开发，共享和汇总评估数据。基于研究的评估工具对物理教育改革产生了重大影响。它们提供了普遍和令人信服的学生理解的措施，教师可以用来评估和改善他们的教学。这些工具可以通过告知教师他们的教学效能感来改变教学实践，以便他们能够提高教学效能感。它们的广泛使用可以通过提供大量数据来比较广泛的机构和学生群体的教学实践，从而改变研究人员对教育改革影响的理解。初步研究的结果表明，物理教师渴望利用他们作为科学家的认知资源来探索大数据，并将他们学生的评估结果与其他学生的评估结果进行比较。 然而，初步研究也表明，许多教师谁使用这些仪器不知道如何解释的结果或如何使用它们来改善他们的教学。此外，由于当地的结果只为个别教师所知，研究人员无法获得这些数据。 由于这些原因，该项目正在将管理评估工具的私人实践转变为在大型教育工作者社区的背景下解释评估结果的社区实践，这些教育工作者在类似的环境中使用类似的实践，比较结果，并使用它们来改变教师个人和整个部门的教学实践。PI团队正在将作为先前NSF资助（WIDER DUE-1256352）的一部分开发的原型数据库扩展为社区论坛和数据浏览器，使教师和研究人员能够以直观，互动和信息丰富的方式轻松上传，讨论和比较他们的数据。数据浏览器具有直观的用户界面，邀请探索和发现，交互式一键分析工具，可扩展的数据库和强大的数据安全性。这一系统将被纳入国家基金会资助的（NSDL DUE-0840853，TUES DUE-1245490）项目，为物理系提供有关研究的在线资源-该项目的智力价值在于易于访问的用户界面，该界面旨在使教师能够与学生的评估数据和国家评估数据进行交互。数据集。教师可以为自己生成报告来解释他们自己的结果，以改善他们的教学，向同事解释他们正在做什么，并将其纳入教学档案，晋升和终身教职报告，以证明他们的教学效率。该数据库全面投入使用后，预计将包括来自数百所高校的结果。该项目的更广泛影响在于获得了前所未有的大量评估数据，为物理教育研究人员和教师打开了回答学生学习问题的大门，这些问题以前无法获得。

A collaborative PI team from Kansas State University and the American Association of Physics Teachers is creating a national model for improving STEM higher education through a community-based web resource to help physics faculty transform their teaching by incorporating teaching methods and assessments based on research into classroom learning. Recognizing that higher education struggles to find ways to evaluate and improve instruction, the project is using a "bottom-up" approach in which discipline-based teachers/researchers develop, share, and aggregate assessment data.Research-based assessment instruments have had a major impact on physics education reform. They provide universal and convincing measures of student understanding that instructors can use to assess and improve their teaching. These instruments can transform teaching practice by informing instructors about their teaching efficacy so that they can improve it. At the same time, their widespread use can transform researchers' understanding of the impact of educational transformation by providing large quantities of data that compare teaching practices across a broad range of institutions and student populations.The results of preliminary studies suggest that physics faculty members are eager to use their cognitive resources as scientists to explore big data and compare their students' assessment results to those of other students like their own. However, the preliminary studies also suggest that many instructors who use these instruments do not know how to interpret the results or how to use them to improve their teaching. Further, because local results are known only to individual instructors, researchers do not have access to this pool of data. For these reasons, the project is turning the private practice of administering assessment instruments into a community practice of interpreting assessment results in the context of a large community of educators using similar practices in similar settings, comparing results, and using them to transform teaching practices both for individual faculty members and for departments as a whole. The PI team is expanding a prototype database developed as part of a previous NSF grant (WIDER DUE-1256352) into a community forum and data explorer that allow instructors and researchers to easily upload, discuss, and compare their data in an intuitive, interactive, and informative way. The data explorer features an intuitive user interface inviting exploration and discovery, interactive one-click analysis tools, a scalable database, and robust data security. This system will be incorporated into the PER User's Guide, an NSF-funded (NSDL DUE-0840853, TUES DUE-1245490) project that provides online resources for physics faculty about research-based teaching methods and assessments.The intellectual merit of this project resides in the easily accessible user interface that is designed to enable faculty members to engage with their students' assessment data and the national dataset. Instructors can generate reports for themselves to interpret their own results in order to improve their teaching, to explain what they are doing to colleagues, and to include in teaching portfolios and promotion and tenure reports that demonstrate their teaching efficacy. When fully operational, the database is expected to include results from hundreds of colleges and universities.The Broader Impacts of the project lie in the access to an unprecedented amount of assessment data that opens the doors for physics education researchers and faculty to answer questions about students' learning that were previously inaccessible.