Role of Assessment in the Development of a STEM School Curriculum

• In Event: Welcome to the Dream: Revolutionizing Education Amid Egypt’s Ongoing Arab Spring

Abstract

Assessment, especially under high stakes accountability, impacts instruction and learning (Au, 2007). The Egyptian high-stakes assessment system requires students to reproduce facts and procedures but does not expect students to understand the conceptual bases of those facts and procedures (OECD & World Bank, 2012). In contrast, the foundation of the ECASE STEM schools described in this symposium is a different type of teaching and learning, one based on conceptual and inquiry models, and one that requires a different model of assessment. As one of the goals of our project is to change what happens in the classroom, we thus need to change assessment. Described in this presentation is the work our team has accomplished, and what we have learned along the way, using assessment in the service of an integrated, problem-based STEM curriculum.

In designing an assessment plan, our team used an Understanding by Design framework (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) whereby curriculum is designed, from the beginning, by delineating what students will be expected to learn and how that learning will be assessed. This requires that assessments need to be conceptually-driven given the conceptual focus of the schools. We pursued extant conceptually-driven assessments to help guide our own development of an assessment system of the ECASE STEM schools, including the Mathematics Assessment Project (MARS, 2012) and concept inventories in math and sciences, such as the well-known Force Concept Inventory (Halloun & Hestenes, 1985).

Our first task as an assessment team was to develop a set of conceptually-driven diagnostic tests in science and mathematics to provide information about the Egyptian students at the schools. We found that while students performed well on the procedural items they performed significantly worse on conceptual ones. As a result of the diagnostic testing, we developed an interim curriculum that took into account student strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, we used the conceptually-driven tests to introduce the students and teachers at the ECASE STEM schools, and the Egyptian Ministry of Education, to our intended reform model.

To further illustrate the difference between the models of instruction, we conducted Surveys of Enacted Curriculum content analyses (Porter, Kirst, Osthoff, Smithson, & Schneider, 1993) on the diagnostic materials and Egyptian assessments. The analyses, which provide a quantitative measure of the content and cognitive demand of an assessment, illustrated the broad coverage and low-average cognitive demand of the Egyptian tests. Our subsequent task has been to aid in the development of a new end-of-school assessment system to be used with the ECASE STEM schools. We will be piloting this new system, using concept inventories, in the fall and this system will be used with students graduating in the spring of 2014.

This presentation will describe the trajectory we have taken as an assessment team supporting the curriculum of the STEM schools. Through this process, we have helped lay the groundwork for broader system-wide change and have many lessons to share. This information should prove to be beneficial for others developing integrated reform curricula or those engaging in international education work.

Authors

• John Baker, 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education

• John Weathers, 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education

• Bates Mandel, 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education