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December 2011 > School
NSF Grant Supports GSE Project To Create Reliable Science Inquiry Assessment
Marcia Linn
Lydia Liu UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education will lead an effort to create reliable measures of inquiry learning using automated scoring methods with support from a recent $3.5 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation. The Continuous Learning and Automated Scoring in Science (CLASS) investigators will research how enhanced assessments of student knowledge and skills advance Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) learning.
Principal investigator and GSE professor Marcia C. Linn and co-principal investigator Ou Lydia Liu, an alumna and research scientist at the Educational Testing Service, will lead CLASS. They will investigate ways to use automated scores for student guidance, classroom assessments and eventually, high-stakes, consequential tests in Bay Area middle schools serving more than 4,000 diverse students.
CLASS responds to the national need for validated science inquiry assessments that efficiently and effectively measure inquiry learning, provide inputs for adaptive student guidance and help teachers and administrators contribute to student success according to Linn.
“The U.S. needs to take advantage of these new technologies to create science activities that both engage students in inquiry learning and document student progress in the course,” says Linn. “Instead, school districts often postpone scientific experimentation until after the last state test has been completed.”
CLASS will build on Linn’s prior and ongoing NSF-funded projects. The project will use the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE), an open source, free and available system to author inquiry science units. CLASS will create five types of automatically scored assessments for inquiry science and identify ways to use these assessments to improve learning outcomes.Automated assessment activities will capture students’ abilities to integrate their ideas and to form coherent scientific arguments. CLASS will design a middle school (grades 6-8) inquiry curriculum featuring automated assessments; investigate how student guidance based on CLASS scores can improve learning outcomes; and design professional development resources to help teachers use CLASS scores to improve inquiry instruction as well as help administrators make informed decisions about supports for science learning.
Other key UC Berkeley GSE affiliated personnel are Jim Slotta, a University of Toronto associate professor and former GSE Research Scientist; postdoctoral scholars Libby Gerard and Camillia Matuk; Doug Kirkpatrick, director of professional development; and Hiroki Terashima, director of the WISE software design group.
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