A Workshop to Improve the Assessment of Professional Development in Technician Education

培养一支高素质的以STEM为导向的技术人员队伍，对国家持续的经济竞争力至关重要。培养这支队伍的一种方法是为那些教授未来技术人员的人提供职业发展(PD)机会。在专业发展机会蓬勃发展的同时，一个持续的挑战是提供证据，证明这些类型的活动在促进在STEM领域从事技术员职业的学生的知识、技能和生产性态度的成长方面具有不同的作用。在改进专业发展活动评估的现有资源系统的基础上，讲习班以及讲习班前后活动的主要目标是完善和测试一套专业发展资源。这些资源共同构成高级技术教育(ATE)资源形成性评估系统(FAS4ATE)工具包。该工具包的测试包括验证收集、分析和使用PD评估数据对于所有ATE项目和中心都是可行的，从而改善对学生结果的评估和报告。该项目将在现有文献和形成性评估和学习工作的基础上，修订和测试FAS4ATE工具包的可用性和可扩展性。与经验丰富的首席调查人员和评估员团队一起试验工具包的实施与资源的专家审查相结合，将调查潜在的假设，即可获得和获得良好设计的资源以评估专业发展将改善对PD活动的评估，并反过来导致关于PD对学生结果的影响的有充分记录和证据的主张。该项目由高级技术教育计划资助，该计划专注于为推动国家经济的先进技术领域培养技术人员。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The development of a well-qualified STEM-oriented technician workforce is critical to the nation's continued economic competitiveness. A means for developing this workforce is to provide professional development (PD) opportunities to those who teach the technicians of the future. While professional development opportunities flourish, an on-going challenge is providing evidence that these types of activities make a difference in fostering the growth of the knowledge, skills, and productive attitudes of students who are pursuing technician careers in STEM fields. Building on a current system of resources to improve the assessment of professional development activities, the primary goal of the workshop and pre- and post-workshop activities is to refine and test a set of professional development resources. Collectively, these resources comprise the Formative Assessment Systems for Advanced Technological Education (ATE) resources (FAS4ATE) toolkit. Testing of this toolkit involves verification that the collection, analysis, and use of PD evaluation data are feasible for all ATE projects and centers, and in turn improve the assessment and reporting of student outcomes.Drawing on current literature and work on formative assessment and learning, the project will revise and test the FAS4ATE toolkit for usability and scalability. The combination of piloting the implementation of the toolkit with well-experienced teams of principal investigators and evaluators with expert review of the resources will investigate the underlying assumption that availability and access to well-design resources to assess professional development will improve the evaluation of PD activities and in turn lead to well documented and evidence-based claims of the effect of PD on student outcomes. This project is funded by the Advanced Technological Education program that focuses on the education of technicians for the advanced-technology fields that drive the nation's economy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.