Formative Assessment to Improve Student Understanding in Chemistry

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LINK

http://chemfacets.sri.com/
http://www.FacetInnovations.com
http://www.Diagnoser.com
http://www.spu.edu/depts/physics/energyproject.htm
Several government funded projects are developing facet-based, diagnostic formative assessments to support teachers in understanding and addressing their students’ conceptual strengths and weaknesses and to promote students’ conceptual change in science at the middle school level, high school level and beyond. These projects bring together experts in assessment, science education, science teaching, and science content from SRI International, FACET Innovations, Sonoma State University, University of Illinois Chicago, Seattle Pacific University and the University of Washington. Supported by research on students’ preconceptions, particularly in science, and their need to build on the knowledge and skills that students bring to the classroom, the projects are aimed at implementing a facets-of-thinking perspective for the improvement of formative assessment, learning, and instruction in precollege science classrooms. Goals are: (1) to identify and develop clusters of facets (students’ ideas and understandings) related to key science concepts; (2) to develop assessment items that diagnose facets within each content cluster; (3) to enhance the existing web-based Diagnoser assessment system for administering items, reporting results, and providing teacher resource materials for interpreting and using the assessment data; (4) to develop teacher professional development and resource materials to support their use of facet-based approaches to teaching of science; and (5) to examine whether student learning improves in classes that incorporate a facet-based assessment and instruction system.

Biology Levers Out of Mathematics (BLOOM)

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Background The Next Generation Science Standards highlight understanding and application as well as the integration of mathematics and computational tools into science. The gap between these goals and classroom reality is particularly salient in high school biology, where memorization is king and mathematics/computational tools are largely absent, even though they are critical for understanding many big ideas and even more critical for later instruction in biology (including AP Biology exams and all biology-related majors in college). As biology is typically a first exposure to high school-level science, it is particularly unfortunate that students experience such an uninteresting, memorization-driven approach. We present a new approach to teaching core biology concepts (inheritance and evolution) involving engaging engineering design challenges that students solve using a combination of inexpensive hands-on materials, basic mathematics, and simple simulations. These materials are made available to teachers through an online tool called iPlan, which gives just-in-time guidance on the how and why of the curriculum steps, an opportunity for teachers to customize the materials to their own classroom needs, an opportunity to see how other teachers have customized each lesson, and an opportunity to engage in discussions with other teachers about these materials.

Documented Results Through engineering design challenges (breeding rare animals for a zoo or breeding rare insects to help children in developing nations), students see purposes and applications of science not normally presented in a science classroom. As a result, we find increases in student engagement during our lessons, and increases in science and engineering career interest. Because students are asked to reason through how to apply mathematics and computational tools to solve the problem, they build deeper understandings of inheritance and evolution concepts. This allows them to solve science problems beyond the memorized examples, and sets a foundation for stronger learning of later science topics. Further, their mathematical skills improve as well, which will be important in the broader high-stakes testing environment (in science and in mathematics). Through use of these materials, teachers also develop a deeper understanding of the concepts they are teaching (e.g., a better understanding of inheritance and evolution). Teachers also learn about engineering design practices (e.g., constraints, optimization, tradeoffs), something that most biology teachers have little knowledge of but will be asked to teach their students about under the Next Generation Science Standards.

STRAND: Effective Instruction

PRESENTER: Christian Schunn, University of Pittsburgh

Prepared for STEM Smart: Lessons Learned From Successful Schools, an NSF event held on March 22, 2013, at University of Maryland, Baltimore

Potential Applications

Variations of the materials have been used successfully implemented across multiple states in a range of urban, suburban, and rural schools districts in the following high school science courses: Biology 1, Honors Biology, Ecology, and AP Biology.

For More Information Contact Christian Schunn at schunn@pitt.edu. http://www.lrdc.pitt.edu/schunn/research/design.html