RELATE interprets “assessment” broadly to include not only current knowledge or skills, but also behaviours, habits, attitudes or even affect. Primarily, this involves inferring the current state of a student’s knowledge or skills from their response to questions. But it may also refer to data mining – e.g. to find out if they do their homework punctually or procrastinate, etc.
We are most interested in assessing detailed information about students, rather than just a score. Thus we analyze more than just examinations, including homework, reading habits, video watching tendencies, etc. Even on a final examination, we’d seek to find what particular abilities or skills each student possessed, and what parts of the course the class didn’t do well on with an eye to improving those parts of the instruction.
We have developed
There are many research-developed instruments that measure specific abilities, first and foremost the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) by Hestenes and collaborators. We have written a Mechanics Reasoning Inventory, our single topic Topical Tests, and Angular Concept Tests.