We're beginning to think about how to assess the quality of the questions that students have been submitting in their courses, and we have recruited a couple of final years Honours project students in Physics to help us out.
A starting point is to generate some ideas for what sort of classification scheme we might want to use to be able to classify the questions. We need to bear in mind there are several HUNDRED questions for each course, so the classification has to be coarse enough to be done reasonably quickly, but fine enough to capture the essence of the questions across different dimensions. Here are examples of 2 such dimensions that we might want to consider:
a. A classification based on cognitive challenge of the questions. We might want to think about mapping onto the various levels of Bloom's Taxonomy: knowledge and recall at the bottom of the hierarchy and so on.
b. Some sort of measure of 'physics sophistication'. Is this question a straightforward application of a single physics principle (eg cons of energy)? etc.
There's a recent paper by Paul Denny on this topic that's going to prove to be a useful starting point for us:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy.webfeat.lib.ed.ac.uk/doi/10.1002/bmb.20526/abstract
Watch this space.
I am just trying to do one important thing a day, doing it well with a degree of quality. Isn’t that the ‘qualitative’ mindset: to give meaning and value about what’s going on in people’s heads? Perhaps qualitative research is even about developing a small idea very, very well.
ReplyDeleteRegards
Agrodut Mandal
Dissertation Writing UK