Developing Scientific Reasoning Assessment Tools for STEM Education and Teacher Preparation

在STEM教育中，被广泛接受的教学目标不仅包括发展坚实的内容知识，还包括发展一般科学推理能力，使学生能够在未来的职业生涯中成功地处理开放式现实世界的任务，并设计自己的实验来解决科学、工程和社会问题。教师经常期望，一致和严格的内容学习将有助于发展学生的一般推理能力。然而，研究表明，内容丰富的STEM教育风格对学生科学推理能力的发展影响不大。研究还表明，探究式科学教学能够促进科学推理能力的提高，教师的科学推理技能也会显著影响他们在科学课程中有效使用探究方法的能力。为了有效地实施探究式科学课程，培养学生的科学知识和科学推理能力，需要有良好的评估工具来评估不同探究式课程的影响。这些评估工具应易于在大规模应用中应用，并产生有效的结果来评估学生的科学推理能力。现有的评估工具对科学推理的覆盖面不够。该项目将在现有资源的基础上开发评估工具和基于科学推理的知识库。拟议的研究和开发将包括开发一套关于科学推理的标准化评估工具，一个从小学高年级到本科大学的知识库，说明学生科学推理的发展，以及一个社区网站，以存档、共享和传播资源，并支持未来促进科学推理的教育研究和发展。

In STEM education, widely accepted teaching goals include not only the development of solid content knowledge but also the development of general scientific reasoning abilities that will enable students to successfully handle open-ended real-world tasks in future careers and design their own experiments to solve scientific, engineering, and social problems. It is often expected by teachers that consistent and rigorous content learning will help develop students' general reasoning abilities. However, research has shown that the content-rich style of STEM education made little impact on the development of students' scientific reasoning abilities. Research also indicates that inquiry based science instruction can promote scientific reasoning abilities and that the scientific reasoning skills of instructors can also significantly affect their ability to use inquiry methods effectively in science courses.In order to effectively implement inquiry based science curricula for students to develop science knowledge and scientific reasoning ability, good assessment tools are needed to evaluate the impact of the different inquiry based curricula. These assessment tools should be easily applied in large-scale applications and produce valid results for evaluating students' scientific reasoning abilities.Existing assessment instruments do not provide enough coverage on scientific reasoning. This project will build on existing resources to develop an assessment instrument and a knowledge base on scientific reasoning. The proposed research and development will include the development of a set of standardized assessment instruments on scientific reasoning, a knowledge base ranging from senior elementary school to undergraduate college illuminating the development of students' scientific reasoning, and a community website to archive, share, and disseminate the resources and to sustain future research and development in education that promotes scientific reasoning.