Analyzing Constructed Responses: Using Linguistic Software to Understand Students' Conceptions in Science

评估/研究（91）生物科学（61）地质（42）本项目正在开发一种有效的方法来揭示学生在入门科学课程中的概念理解和概念障碍。起点是学生建构的反应。这些要求学生解释科学现象，因此有很好的潜力揭示学生的概念障碍。由于资源限制，学生评估通常使用多项选择题而不是构建的回答题。评估构建响应的成本和物流在大型机构中大多数入门科学课程的典型的大规模招生课程中是令人望而却步的。这个项目正在研究多种方法来应用计算机语言分析的进步，以减少评估构建反应评估的时间和成本。这些多种方法被用于从学生的回答中提取概念类别，并使用这些数据建立学生在生物学和地质学学科中应用这些概念的统计模型。这些数据来自大量入学的学生，入门本科课程，每学期有几百名学生入学。智力优势：这些模型可能有助于提高教育工作者对学生概念障碍的理解，并对其他试图诊断学生概念障碍的研究进行检查。项目团队是一个跨学科的团队，具有生物学、地质学、科学教育、教师教育、统计学和教学技术等方面的专业知识，并具有合作经验。更广泛的影响：教学上的改变，把重点放在学生的学习而不是教学上，可能会产生巨大的影响。使用揭示学生概念障碍的评估将有助于教师通过解决导致STEM学科流失的概念困难来改善教学。在这个项目完成后，各个科学学科的教师将有机会使用一种新的工具来评估论文的反应，即使是在大量招生的课程中。

Assessment/Research (91)Biological Sciences (61)Geology (42)This project is developing an efficient means for revealing students' conceptual understanding and conceptual barriers in introductory science courses. The starting point is student constructed responses. These require students to explain scientific phenomena and thus have good potential to reveal student conceptual barriers. Because of resource limitations, student assessment is often undertaken using multiple choice items rather than constructed response items. The costs and logistics of evaluating constructed responses are prohibitive in large enrollment courses that are typical of most introductory science courses in large institutions.This project is investigating multiple approaches to applying advances in computerized linguistic analysis in order to reduce the time and cost of evaluating constructed response assessments. These multiple approaches are being used to extract conceptual categories from student responses and using these data to build statistical models of students' application of those concepts in the disciplines of biology and geology. The data are being derived from students in large enrollment, introductory undergraduate courses, each with an enrollment of several hundred students per semester.Intellectual Merit: These models are likely to be useful for improving educators' understanding of student conceptual barriers and as a check on other research seeking to diagnose student conceptual barriers. The project team is an interdisciplinary group with expertise in biology, geology, science education, teacher education, statistics, and instructional technology, and has experience in working together. Broader Impacts: Changes in instruction to focus on student learning rather than on teaching has the potential for large impact. Using assessments that reveal students' conceptual barriers will help instructors to improve teaching by addressing the conceptual difficulties that contribute to attrition in STEM disciplines. At the completion of this project, instructors across the scientific disciplines will have access to a new tool for assessing essay responses, even in large enrollment courses.