Design Patterns For Assessing Science Inquiry (Padi Technical Report 1)

Abstract

Designing systems for assessing inquiry in science requires expertise across domains that rarely resides in a single individual: science content and learning, assessment design, task authoring, psychometrics, delivery technologies, and systems engineering. The goal of the Principled Assessment Designs for Inquiry (PADI) project is to provide a conceptual framework for designing inquiry tasks that coordinates such efforts and provides supporting tools to facilitate them. This paper reports progress on one facet of PADI: design patterns for assessing science inquiry. Design patterns bridge knowledge about aspects of science inquiry that one would want to assess and the structures of a coherent assessment argument, in a format that guides task creation and assessment implementation. The focus at the design pattern level is on the substance of the assessment argument rather than on the technical details of operational elements and delivery systems, which will be considered within the PADI system, but at a later stage of the process. We discuss the nature and role of design patterns in assessment design, suggest contents and structures for creating and working with them, and illustrate the ideas with a small start-up set of design patterns.