WK 4 - Assess What’s Important: Creating Assessments That Show How Students Use Their Ecological Knowledge

Session Description: Designing assessments that demonstrate what students know and are able to do are key to transforming undergraduate ecology. Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education and the Ecological Society of America’s Four-dimensional Ecology Education (4DEE) Framework provide conceptual frameworks for thinking about and designing undergraduate biology/ecology courses. Both emphasize multidimensional learning that helps instructors define what students should learn (core ideas), and do with their knowledge (scientific practices). The 4DEE framework also highlights how students focus their knowledge through multiple lenses (crosscutting concepts) and connect ecological phenomena and society (human-environment interactions). The 2012 National Research Council report, A Framework for K-12 Science Education advocates a similar framework for pre-college students, and initially introduced the idea of three-dimensional learning as a guide to help students develop a robust understanding of science.

Workshop participants will engage in groups to redesign their own exam items by developing constructed-response and selected-response assessments that are aligned with learning objectives and guided by the criteria we have developed as part of the Three-Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol (3D-LAP; Laverty et al 2016) and the 4DEE Framework https://www.esa.org/4DEE/. Facilitators will guide assessment item development and alignment with learning objectives. Participants will leave with a working knowledge of how to apply multidimensional learning to modify existing assessment items and build new ones. Please bring a sample exam to work with and the core ideas for student learning from your course.



This workshop is intended to be complementary to the other 4DEE workshops.