Eugenia Etkina, Alan Van Heuvelen, Suzanne Brahmia, David Brookes, Chris D'Amato; Michael Gentile, Anna Karelina, Marina Miner- Bolotin, Sahana Murthy, David Rosengrant, Maria Ruibal-Vilassenor, Aaron Warren, Xueli Zou
Introduction to Scientific Abilities Project
Welcome to the website of the Rutgers Physics and Astronomy Education Research group dedicated to the “Scientific Abilities” Project. This project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation program “Assessing Student Achievement” (NSF-ASA). The goal of the project is to help students develop some of the abilities used by scientists and engineers in their work. The abilities we work on include:
- an ability to represent knowledge in multiple ways;
- an ability to design experiments to investigate new phenomena, test hypotheses and solve experimental problems;
- an ability to collect and analyze experimental data;
- an ability to devise and test relationships and explanations;
- an ability to evaluate reasoning and experimental design.
The abilities are described in detail in the section entitled "The Abilities".
We developed a series of tasks that help students develop these abilities (we call them formative assessment tasks). These include:
- multiple representations tasks;
- experimental design tasks;
- modeling tasks;
- anomalous data tasks;
- video problems and
- evaluation tasks.
We also developed scoring rubrics to assess students' scientific abilities. The rubrics can be downloaded from the section entitled "Rubrics".
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