STLHE 2016 SAPES

Increasingly, undergraduate courses need to help students develop and apply 21st Century skills such as scientific reasoning and critical thinking. This shift requires assessments that are scalable to large numbers of students and that can measure the sophistication of students' thinking in diverse classes. Traditional assessments tend to focus more on students' knowledge of concepts or procedures. Furthermore, the effectiveness of courses is measured primarily by student evaluations of teaching, and there is evidence that additional proxy measures of meaningful student learning may be helpful in equitably evaluating the success of courses.
One-minute papers, also known as exit tickets, are a formative assessment strategy that asks students to respond to one or two short-answer prompts following an in-class lesson. Typically, the prompts ask students to identify a key take-home lesson and a question or confusion they have about the lesson. Students' responses help instructors gauge students' understanding and engagement in the class. There has been much effort to assess higher-order skills such as critical thinking and reasoning through coding students' written statements on online discussion forums. We investigate how coding one-minute papers for sophistication of reasoning might provide a useful proxy measure of aggregate student engagement and growth in critical thinking in a general-education physics class. In future work, we plan to investigate using automated methods to statistically code aggregate levels of scientific reasoning in large-enrollment classes.
You are invited to discuss these preliminary results, and more generally, how we may derive measures from formative assessments to gauge students’ development of higher-order skills across the curriculum.