Collaborative Research: Eliciting and Assessing Process Skills in STEM

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In response to the national need to improve undergraduate STEM education, many instructors have implemented engaged student learning strategies into their courses. These pedagogies involve the development of students' process skills, such as communication, teamwork, critical thinking, and problem solving, as students learn STEM content. Because most STEM instructors have little training in how to assess student performance in these areas, the goal of this EHR: IUSE project will be to create resources that can be readily adopted to assess student process skills in a wide range of classroom types and across STEM disciplines. A secondary goal will be to create professional development tools to improve the recognition and assessment of process skills by instructors and administrators at academic institutions.Assessment is critical to improvement of student learning in STEM courses because it provides a measure of achievement and facilitates learning. The types of assessment used by instructors telegraph to students what is valued in a course. In order to better align engaged instructional methods and assessment this project will result in the development and evaluation of (a) a set of student interaction rubrics to assess evidence of process skills in active learning classroom environments, (b) a set of student product rubrics to assess evidence of process skills in student written work, and (c) an implementation guide to assist instructors in identifying and designing tasks that elicit evidence of process skill development and to facilitate the effective implementation of the rubrics. Formative and summative evaluation will be addressed through ongoing assessment and revision of the rubrics; a process that will also establish their validity, reliability, and utility. Oral and written feedback will be obtained from faculty participants. They will also provide input on the usability of the implementation guidebook throughout its development. The propagation of the rubrics and implementation guide will occur through the POGIL network. The two workshops will be part of the six, annual POGIL regional meeting agendas. Results of this work will be submitted to the Journal of College Science Teaching.