Online Assessment for STEM

Moving to a fully online learning environment can dramatically shift the teaching practice in STEM courses. Faculty who have had excellent success in a face-to-face classroom, lecturing to students who use pen and paper to practice problems and take notes, now need to carefully reconsider how they will engage learners. More importantly, they need to review how their students interact with the technical, mathematical and scientific language of their discipline. They might be wondering, “How will I direct my learners to practice?” or “How will I scaffold my activities to prepare learners for evaluations?”

Automated Assessments

Consider using multiple choice to engage, provide feedback and possibly evaluate learners. All learning management systems (LMS), like Brightspace, offer multiple choice and other similar question options. Multiple choice questions delivered to students online have some advantages for faculty, such as question pools, automated feedback, and aggregate class performance data.

For example, a question pool is a set of questions with the same level of complexity and on the same topic. When I teach Physics and build online assessment banks, I pool a set of questions related to Newton’s second law.

F=ma

I can ask a simple one-step question in three different ways.

Find:

‘F’ given ‘m’ and ‘a’,
‘m’ given ‘F’ and ‘a’
‘a’, given ‘m’ and ‘F’

I consider them to be the same level of complexity and on the same topic, so I can place them all in the same pool.

Many systems are capable of generating random variables for the given information within set parameters. This ability to pool questions and generate random variables can help prevent academic integrity issues online and allows learners to practice with similar and endless problem sets.

Another advantage of creating these kinds of assessments is that they can provide instant feedback to the learners. It is possible to customize feedback based on user responses and direct them to what they need to learn to succeed in their course. Learning analytics are highly efficient and effective because they are captured for multiple choice, or similar auto-corrected assessments, allowing faculty to have more frequent and dynamic understandings of the learners’ current individual performance levels. Reviewing and knowing where students are under performing can help direct instruction to areas that are needed to best serve your students.

However, automated assessments have limitations. Even though you can have learners analyze and apply concepts, such as identifying the slope of a graph, there is a level of complexity that is not captured. For that, different types of evidence of learning is needed.

Online Learning Software

There are a number of software programs and technologies that will facilitate learner engagement in STEM. For example, in online Math courses there are opportunities to practice problem solving in more engaging ways than multiple choice questions. Homework systems such as Webwork or MyOpenMath allow faculty to create and adopt problems that can be assigned to students. These systems provide built in latex editors for learners to input answers. There are also many online open source applets and simulations that students can engage with to help their comprehension of certain topics such as PhET. These homework systems and simulations provide more dynamic opportunities for learning because students are challenged to create and solve in more complex ways.

Traditionally, using longer answer question types, which students would have to solve with lines of mathematical and scientific script on paper, worked as a popular practice for the evaluation of student’s achievement of outcomes in face-to-face courses. Online, this practice is challenged because the learners interface with the language through screens and writing latex in editors, which is often something learners are not efficient at. Faculty need to reorient their assessments to the course outcomes in ways that online tools permit. High stakes online exams are not ideal. It is possible to require assignments through which learners can show evidence of their achievement in authentic and meaningful ways outside of testing. Whatever you choose, make sure you consider how students can practice, learn, and show evidence of that learning and remember that it is possible to demonstrate mastery in alternative ways.

For example, I had students in my Physics class identify a video that represented circular motion. They had to describe it mathematically and use their creativity to express that description to the group. I graded them using a rubric that was both efficient and effective at evaluating the accuracy of their analysis. This is a simple example of how we can apply alternative assessments. Ask students to create something that shows us they have achieved the desired outcome. Have them choose the context, the event, or the problem. Require them to author the problem and solve it.

Regardless of what you decide, allow yourself the opportunity to reconsider how your practice aligns with online methods, and design with this in mind. Let’s not force our traditional classroom delivery into an online modality. Rather, be open to how learners show their achievements and ready to shift the teaching role from lecturer to moderator and from expert to facilitator.