Improving consistency in large laboratory courses: a design for a standardized practical exam.
Laboratory courses serve as important gateways to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. One of the challenges in assessing laboratory learning is to conduct meaningful and standardized practical exams, especially for large multisection laboratory courses. Laboratory practical exams in life sciences courses are frequently administered by asking students to move from station to station to answer questions, apply knowledge gained during laboratory experiments, interpret data, and identify various tissues and organs using various microscopic and gross specimens. This approach puts a stringent time limit on all questions regardless of the level of difficulty and also invariably increases the potential risk of cheating. To avoid potential cheating in laboratory courses with multiple sections, the setup for practical exams is often changed in some way between sections. In laboratory courses with multiple instructors or teaching assistants, practical exams may be handled inconsistently among different laboratory sections, due to differences in background knowledge, perceptions of the laboratory goals, or prior teaching experience. In this article, we describe a design for a laboratory practical exam that aims to align the assessment questions with well-defined laboratory learning objectives and improve the consistency among all laboratory sections.
['Chen|Xinnian|X|', 'Graesser|Donnasue|D|', 'Sah|Megha|M|']
D001690:Biological Science Disciplines D003194:Computer-Assisted Instruction D003479:Curriculum D004517:Education, Professional D004521:Educational Measurement D004522:Educational Status D006801:Humans D007753:Laboratories D007858:Learning D016730:Program Development D011786:Quality Control D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires D013663:Teaching D013997:Time Factors
large laboratory course assessment laboratory practical exam backward design standardized test