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

发展一支合格的STEM技术人员队伍对国家持续的经济竞争力至关重要。 发展这支劳动力的一种手段是为那些教授未来技术人员的人提供专业发展（PD）机会。 虽然专业发展机会蓬勃发展，但一个持续的挑战是提供证据表明，这些类型的活动在促进在STEM领域追求技术人员职业的学生的知识，技能和生产态度的增长方面发挥了作用。 在现有资源系统的基础上，改进对专业发展活动的评估，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。这些资源共同组成了先进技术教育（ATE）资源（FAS4ATE）工具包的形成性评估系统。该工具包的测试包括验证PD评估数据的收集，分析和使用对于所有ATE项目和中心都是可行的，并反过来改善学生成果的评估和报告。利用当前的文献和形成性评估和学习的工作，该项目将修改和测试FAS4ATE工具包的可用性和可扩展性。 与经验丰富的主要研究者和评估者团队一起试点实施工具包，并对资源进行专家审查，这将调查潜在的假设，即获得设计良好的资源来评估专业发展将改善PD活动的评估，并进而导致PD对学生成绩的影响有据可查和循证索赔。 该项目由先进技术教育计划资助，该计划侧重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价值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.