The Design of Assessments for Tracking Science Practices

eeLocation: Ballroom E
This is an expertise exchange in the Cyberlearning 2017 Expertise Exchange session

Janice Gobert, Rutgers University
Michael Sao Pedro, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

In this expertise exchange, we will present how we leverage the Evidence-centered Design methodology (Mislevy et al. 1999) to develop performance-based formative assessments of students’ science practices (inquiry) in our ongoing research. We will describe how we defined skills to be measured, our process for designing tasks that elicits those skills, and how we use educational data mining techniques and knowledge engineering to score students’ inquiry and track their growth over time. We will also describe how we utilize these assessment data to provide personalized, immediate feedback to students, and to provide teachers with actionable information via reports and real-time alerts they can use to tailor instruction on-the-fly.