Technology and Assessment Thinking Ahead: Proceedings from a Workshop (2002) / Chapter Skim
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2 Technology Supports for Assessing Science Inquiry
2 Technology Supports for Assessing Science Inquiry
Pages 12-25
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From page 12... ...
get flexibly combined with each other in different permutations in the course of different kinds of science investigations (see Champagne, Kouba, & Hurley, 2000; NRC, 2000~. Nor is science inquiry independent of content knowledge.
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From page 13... ...
, ·, , , ~ , ~ While classroom assessment practices do not have to conform to the time limits that constrain externally imposed standardized tests, many teachers mimic the format and focus of standardized tests when they are creating assessment tools for classroom use (NRC, 2001a)
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From page 14... ...
Multimedia environments offer opportunities to present students with complex, lifelike situations in which they can pursue a sustained investigation or inquiry. Because students can engage in multiple phases of inquiry (for example, planning an investigation into the quality of the water in a given watershed; collecting data within a simulated environment; organizing and analyzing the data they have collected; forming conclusions and communicating their procedure, findings, and explanations)
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From page 15... ...
Focus refers to the breadth of student understanding or skill the assessment seeks to capture. Many attempts to get at students' thinking, either within the context of research or within the moment-by-moment assessment practices of teachers, are concerned with a very specific aspect of knowledge or skill—the Table 2-1 Contrasts Between Innovative 1 ecnnology-~ a_ ~ , ~ .
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From page 16... ...
While the research-based assessments provide guidance as to what is important to measure from a learning science perspective and are extremely useful sources of inspiration for new approaches to measurement, they are typically narrow in focus. When critics of embedded assessments and performance assessments deride them as "learning activities," these misgivings reflect a concern that the assessment is so entwined with one particular instructional activity that it could not be used for broader purposes or on a wider scale.
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From page 17... ...
One of these tasks, for example, presented students with a set of climate-related criteria for choosing a site for the next Winter Olympics. Given multiple types of climate data on a set of feasible candidate cities, students were asked to analyze the data in terms of the criteria, decide which candidate city best met the climate criteria overall, and prepare a persuasive presentation for the Olympic Committee, complete with graphs of relevant climate data contrasting the city they chose with the default candidate (Salt Lake City)
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From page 18... ...
While students enjoyed completing the Web-based assessments, and the assessments served the purposes of our evaluation, such assessments, like those embedded within learning systems discussed above, have limitations and do not satisfy broader assessment needs. To date, much of SRI's effort in assessment has been devoted to finding ways to use technology tools to deliver and capture students' performance.
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From page 19... ...
. FUTURE DIRECTIONS: PRINCIPLED ASSESSMENT DESIGNS FOR INQUIRY Our experiences developing technology-based assessment tasks for use within evaluation studies and by classroom teachers left us convinced of the potential contributions technology could make to assessment practices, but at the same time highly aware of the need for a more systematic approach to the enterprise.
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From page 20... ...
The essential PAD} concept is a system for developing reusable assessment-task templates, organized around schemes of inquiry that are based on research from cognitive psychology and science education. The completed system will have multiple components, including: generally stated rubrics for recognizing and evaluating evidence of inquiry skills; an organized set of assessment development resources; and an initial collection of schemes, exemplar templates, and assessment tasks.
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From page 21... ...
PADI will have multiple components, including: a classification of different types of science inquiry tasks, each of which can become the basis for an assessment "template"; generally stated rubrics for recognizing and evaluating evidence of inquiry skills within each developed template; an organized set of assessment development resources; an initial collection of schemes, exemplar templates, and assessment tasks produced in the context of the BioKIDS and FOSS projects; and a statistical mode! that will support rigorous analyses of student learning.
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From page 22... ...
By retrofitting these assessment tasks to the PADI framework, we were able to demonstrate the usability of the PADI design processes with individuals who were new to the approach, but whose skills and backgrounds were similar to those of our curriculum development partners. RESEARCH ON QUALITY OF EVIDENCE OF STUDENT LEARNING AND SCALABILITY The PAD} project will conduct research on whether the assessments that are generated provide better evidence about students' inquiry skills and whether the PADI design process is scalable.
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From page 23... ...
CONCLUSION The recent National Research Council publication Knowing What Students Know (200ib) asserts that "Developers of educational curricula and classroom assessments should create tools that will enable teachers to implement high-quality instructional and assessment practices, consistent with modern understanding of how students learn and how such learning can be measured" A
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From page 24... ...
. Classroom assessment and the National Science Education Standards.
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From page 25... ...
(2001~. Design of student assessment tools for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE)
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