Developing Open Response Assessments to Evaluate How Undergraduates Engage in Mathematical Sensemaking in Biology, Chemistry, and Physics

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This project aims to serve the national interest by developing new tools to assess how students engage in making sense of quantitative problems in biology, chemistry, and physics. Mathematical sensemaking in science focuses on students’ ability to blend core disciplinary science ideas with cross-cutting mathematical concepts, such as patterns and proportions, while engaging in scientific practices such as computational thinking, making predictions, and reasoning from evidence. Current visions for undergraduate STEM education stress the need to integrate i) key disciplinary ideas and ii) crosscutting concepts with iii) authentic scientific practices, resulting in what is called three-dimensional learning. This requires developing new assessments with the ability to detect when students engage in three-dimensional learning and reveal this to instructors. This project seeks to extend previous work to identify opportunities to observe mathematical sensemaking in science in the classroom. The project plans to develop open-ended questions to explore undergraduate mathematical sensemaking in science using three dimensional learning assessments. This serves the goal of improving STEM education at the undergraduate level by providing engaging and authentic assessments capable of revealing student thinking. Findings from this project should help inform teaching practice in undergraduate STEM courses and help students foster computational thinking skills. The project will target two aims. Aim 1 is to apply an evidence-centered design process to develop open-ended assessment items that elicit mathematical sensemaking in science (MaSS) and align with a three-dimensional learning (3DL) assessment framework. The evidence-centered design approach for the assessments will provide an opportunity to collect validity evidence throughout the process and allow development of similar items across disciplines. Assessment tasks and coding rubrics will be based on frameworks for 3DL and MaSS, and will be iteratively revised to elicit and categorize student MaSS. The project will conduct interviews with undergraduates to examine their MaSS while completing the assessment items, and with college faculty to ensure alignment with disciplinary topics and phenomena common in college courses. Aim 2 is to administer constructed response items across undergraduate science disciplines to explore how undergraduates engage in MaSS across biology, chemistry, and physics. The project will administer the assessment items from Aim 1 at a diverse set of undergraduate institutions to collect student responses. These responses will be used to establish evidence of the validity, reliability, and fairness of the items quantitatively. Further, the responses will be used to explore how undergraduates engage in MaSS in varied science disciplines. The project meets the need for developing rich, formative assessment items for undergraduate 3DL that reveal student thinking, which is essential for instruction aimed to foster MaSS. The project will also advance understanding of how undergraduates integrate thinking about key STEM concepts and mathematics across disciplines by following a 3DL assessment framework. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through its Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.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.