Collaborative Research: Impacting Assessment Practices of Postsecondary Faculty Teaching Gateway Chemistry Courses

This project aims to serve the national interest by improving undergraduate chemistry education. Assessing the nature and quality of students’ learning in science courses is a complex process. Since students focus their learning efforts on what they expect they will be tested on, high-quality assessments are vitally important as drivers of student learning.

Results of assessments also inform stakeholders such as institutional accreditation boards and future employers. However, faculty members who teach college science courses typically do not receive training about how to create and use robust assessments in their courses. This project will provide professional development experiences for faculty members at two-year colleges to help them use robust assessment practices in their general chemistry and organic chemistry courses.

The project will conduct a series of four three-day regional workshops for faculty members. Each workshop will be followed by a yearlong virtual mentoring experience for the participants, to support them as they implement what they learned in the workshops. Attendees will be encouraged to participate in teams from the same institution or geographical area to maximize local support and community development.

The professional communities and assessment plans developed throughout the project are expected to have sustained impacts on faculty members’ assessment practices and on students’ learning in their chemistry courses.

This collaboration between the University of South Florida, Grand Valley State University, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will design, implement, and evaluate professional development experiences for faculty members at two-year colleges. Faculty workshop participants will gain knowledge and skills in developing course learning objectives, aligning course learning objectives with disciplinary frameworks, articulating test specification documents, and writing and evaluating assessment items.

Throughout the subsequent academic year, participants will implement the assessment materials they developed. Monthly online meetings will be held for participants to share their implementation experiences and offer each other support, and for the project team to provide mentorship. Throughout the face-to-face workshops and online mentoring meetings, the project team will also collect data to develop, refine, and evaluate a model of faculty assessment practice change.

The Teacher-Centered Systemic Reform model will serve as the guiding framework. Case studies will be constructed for each participant based on workshop and implementation artifacts, semi-structured interviews and surveys of the workshop participants that highlight how personal and cultural context and beliefs about teaching and learning are associated with enacted assessment practices.

A cross case analysis will be conducted to better understand the impact of the workshops and online meetings including accelerators and barriers of assessment practice change, role of community in promoting assessment reform, and opportunities to improve postsecondary faculty professional development. The workshop materials and research findings from the project will be incorporated into future assessment workshops offered by the American Chemical Society’s Chemical Education Examinations Institute.

The success of the project will be evaluated by an external advisory board. The project has the potential to generate new knowledge regarding the impact of a community practice approach to assessment practice reform in STEM education. This project is funded by the NSF IUSE: EHR Program, which supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students.

Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.