Collaborative Research: Community Implementation: WIDER:Data Explorer and Assessment Resources for Faculty

American Association Of Physics Teachers, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

A collaborative PI team from Kansas State University and the American Association of Physics Teachers is creating a national model for improving STEM higher education through a community-based web resource to help physics faculty transform their teaching by incorporating teaching methods and assessments based on research into classroom learning. Recognizing that higher education struggles to find ways to evaluate and improve instruction, the project is using a "bottom-up" approach in which discipline-based teachers/researchers develop, share, and aggregate assessment data. Research-based assessment instruments have had a major impact on physics education reform. They provide universal and convincing measures of student understanding that instructors can use to assess and improve their teaching. These instruments can transform teaching practice by informing instructors about their teaching efficacy so that they can improve it. At the same time, their widespread use can transform researchers' understanding of the impact of educational transformation by providing large quantities of data that compare teaching practices across a broad range of institutions and student populations. The results of preliminary studies suggest that physics faculty members are eager to use their cognitive resources as scientists to explore big data and compare their students' assessment results to those of other students like their own. However, the preliminary studies also suggest that many instructors who use these instruments do not know how to interpret the results or how to use them to improve their teaching. Further, because local results are known only to individual instructors, researchers do not have access to this pool of data. For these reasons, the project is turning the private practice of administering assessment instruments into a community practice of interpreting assessment results in the context of a large community of educators using similar practices in similar settings, comparing results, and using them to transform teaching practices both for individual faculty members and for departments as a whole. The PI team is expanding a prototype database developed as part of a previous NSF grant (WIDER DUE-1256352) into a community forum and data explorer that allow instructors and researchers to easily upload, discuss, and compare their data in an intuitive, interactive, and informative way. The data explorer features an intuitive user interface inviting exploration and discovery, interactive one-click analysis tools, a scalable database, and robust data security. This system will be incorporated into the PER User's Guide, an NSF-funded (NSDL DUE-0840853, TUES DUE-1245490) project that provides online resources for physics faculty about research-based teaching methods and assessments. The intellectual merit of this project resides in the easily accessible user interface that is designed to enable faculty members to engage with their students' assessment data and the national dataset. Instructors can generate reports for themselves to interpret their own results in order to improve their teaching, to explain what they are doing to colleagues, and to include in teaching portfolios and promotion and tenure reports that demonstrate their teaching efficacy. When fully operational, the database is expected to include results from hundreds of colleges and universities. The Broader Impacts of the project lie in the access to an unprecedented amount of assessment data that opens the doors for physics education researchers and faculty to answer questions about students' learning that were previously inaccessible.