A Pilot study of higher-order thinking skills assessment techniques in science and mathematics : final report (original) (raw)
In the 21st century, the population will need to possess basic skills in the areas of communication and higher problem-solving as well as have scientific and technological literacy; however, results from assessments by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have indicated weak student performance in the area of thinking skills, making inferences from printed material, and interpreting the meaning of scientific data. The educational community has called for increased emphasis on problem-solvin and higher order skills in NAEP's 1985-86 assessment. The goal of a project, as funded to investigate these thinking skills, was to develop and test a variety of measures for use in a future national assessment. Part 1 of this pilot project developed and assessed the quality and appropriateness of certai innovative tasks and procedures to measure the higher-order thinking skills used in science and mathematics. First, a conceptual framework of higher-order skills used in science and mathematics, then prototype exercises, including "hands-on" activities, were developed. Some exercises were adapted from those used successfully by the United Kingdom's Assessment of Performance Unit in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. These efforts resulted in a set of tasks which asked the students to "think" about a variety of relationships in mathematics and science. Three categories of administrative formats were used (1) group activities to intact classes, (2) station activities consisting of "hands-on" tasks, and (3) full investigations which were administered to individual students. Almost 1.000 students in grades 3, 7, and 11 from 12 districts throughout the country participated. Scoring guides were developed, and student responses were categorized, entered into the computer, and analyzed. Results showed that students were responding to the tasks, and data conformed to expectations about basic developmental trends in thinking skills. In Part II, the pilot-tested tasks are presented individually. The group tasi.= Rre presented first, followed by the station activities, and then the individually administered full invnstigations. Th presentation for each task consists first of the task as the students saw it; followed by Cirections for the administrator and the observation checklist, where these are pertinent: a description of the apparatus; the scoring guide with illustrative examples of each score level: and summary comments about the task. The data on which the comments are based included student performance on each task by grade and by sex and the correlation coefficient between the number right on the mathematics and science items and student data for most of the tasks. Separate analyses by sex were conducted to determine if there were an obvious gender biases in the tasks. No tests for significance were done on the gender results. (JAZ)