Collaborative Research: SPARST: Assessing the Process of Science

这是一项由州立常青学院和科学学院合作的项目，旨在创建、验证和传播一项科学过程和推理技能测试（SPARST），以评估学生对实验设计、数据分析、绘图和科学写作等技能的掌握程度。SPARST旨在帮助生物学教师：a)衡量新生的技能水平；b)修订本科课程，以更好地解决技能教学和内容教学的问题；c)创建一个全国性的网络，以共享技能教学实践和资源；d)提高理科生和非理科生的普遍科学素养。智力优势：由于生物科学领域很少有这种类型的测试，SPARST将有助于告知教师他们在帮助学生发展这些技能方面的有效性，并将帮助学生为进入研究生院或科学职业做好更好的准备。更广泛的影响：SPARST正在几个机构进行测试，并进行迭代修订，以便为分发创建有效和可靠的测试。该测试将是免费的，并在网上提供多项选择题和简答题。它被设计成在线评分；为了便于评分，将对简答题的回答进行汇编，并为教师提供经过验证的评分标准。实施SPARST的教师将获得一份免费的、描述性的学生能力诊断报告，该报告将表明每个学生在每个科学过程技能领域的比例问题子集上的表现如何，以及教师的课程与类似机构的匿名子集的类似生物学课程相比如何。该项目由生物科学理事会生物基础设施司和教育和人力资源理事会本科教育司共同资助，作为其本科生物学教育愿景与变革工作的一部分。

This collaborative project between Evergreen State College and is creating, validating, and disseminating a science process and reasoning skills test (SPARST) to assess students' acquisition of such skills as experimental design, data analysis, graphing, and scientific writing. SPARST is being designed to help biology faculty: a) gauge the skill level of incoming students, b) revise undergraduate curricula to better address the teaching of skills along with content, c) create a national network for sharing skill-teaching practices and resources, and d) improve the general science literacy of both science majors and non-majors. Intellectual Merit: Since there are few tests of this type available within the biological sciences, SPARST will help inform faculty of their effectiveness at helping students develop these skills and will help students become better prepared to enter graduate school or careers in science.Broader Impact: SPARST is being tested at several institutions and revised iteratively in order to create a valid and reliable test for distribution. The test will be free and available on-line as multiple choice and short-answer questions. It is designed to be graded online; responses to short answer questions will be compiled for ease of grading and faculty will be provided with a validated grading rubric. Faculty who implement SPARST will be provided with a free, descriptive diagnostic of their students' abilities that will indicate how well each student performed on the subset of scaled questions in each science process skill area and how the faculty's class compares to similar biology classes at an anonymous subset of similar institutions.This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education efforts.