Investigating the use of technology enhanced assessment to reduce demographic gaps in attainment in physics.

该项目旨在解决在物理学方面的人口统计差距；这意味着，不仅某些学生群体，例如特定性别、社会经济群体或族裔或残疾学生，在高等教育水平上学习这门学科的可能性大大降低，而且那些确实学习的学生在完成学业和通过学业方面的保留率也较低。这造成了“漏水管道”，学生和工人在特定人口群体中的比例进一步下降。各种因素被假设为造成这些成绩差异的原因，特别是有证据表明，不同的学生对不同的评估任务和任务中的不同特征做出了不同的反应(Dawkins等人，2017年)。具体的主题将：(1)开发和评估一种工具，该工具旨在发展问题解决技能并帮助学生在早期未发表的工作的基础上“自我搭建脚手架”(参见Bolton&Ross，1997，上下文)。这是对两所非常不同的大学的发现的回应，即具有最少支架的开放式问题会导致特别大的成就差距(Gibson等人，2015；Dawkins等人，2017)。(2)进一步探索在不同类型的交互式计算机评分评估问题上存在巨大差异的性别差异(Jordan等人，2017)，并扩展这项工作，以考虑其他人口群体之间的其他差异。(3)调查残疾学生对复杂的计算机评分评估的承受能力(Bell，2009)。

This project seeks to address demographic gaps in attainment in physics; these mean that not only are certain groups of students, e.g. those of particular gender, socio-economic group or ethnicity or with a disability, considerably less likely to study the subject at higher education level, but also that those who do study have lower levels of retention in completing and passing their studies. This contributes to the "leaky pipeline" whereby the percentage of students and workers in particular demographic groups declines further and further. Various factors have been hypothesised as contributing to these discrepancies in attainment, in particular evidence is emerging that different students respond differently to different assessment tasks and to different features within the tasks (Dawkins et al., 2017). Particular themes will:(1) Develop and evaluate a tool that seeks to develop problem-solving skills and to help students to "self-scaffold", based on earlier unpublished work (see Bolton & Ross, 1997, for context). This is in response to the finding, at two very different universities, that open-ended questions with minimal scaffolding result in particularly large attainment gaps (Gibson et al, 2015; Dawkins et al, 2017).(2) Further explore the vastly different gender gaps in attainment on different types interactive computer-marked assessment question (Jordan et al., 2017) and extend this work to consider other differences between other demographic groups.(3) Investigate the affordances of sophisticated computer-marked assessment for students with disabilities (Bell, 2009).