Assessing science

Assessing Learning in Informal Science Contexts

This paper is primarily concerned with the assessment of outcomes in informal settings with a particular focus on science learning. An examination of hypothesized or presumed outcomes (both intended and serendipitous) of informal science learning experiences leads on to a critical analysis of the methodologies and methods used to assess those outcomes across a wide range of contexts. The eviden...

Assessing what to address in science communication.

As members of a democratic society, individuals face complex decisions about whether to support climate change mitigation, vaccinations, genetically modified food, nanotechnology, geoengineering, and so on. To inform people's decisions and public debate, scientific experts at government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and other organizations aim to provide understandable and scientific...

Assessing implicit science learning in digital games

Building on the promise shown in game-based learning research, this paper explores methods for Game-Based Learning Assessments (GBLA) using a variety of educational data mining techniques (EDM). GBLA research examines patterns of behaviors evident in game data logs for the measurement of implicit learning—the development of unarticulated knowledge that is not yet expressible on a test or formal...

Assessing Science Inquiry using MDP Goal Detectors

Complex cognitive tasks, such as science inquiry, often involve a sequence of goals, each of which is pursued through a sequence of actions. Effective assessment of inquiry performance requires identification of these student goals. Markov decision processes (MDPs) have been used to infer goals and beliefs over a single directed sequence of actions (Baker et al., 2009), but multi-goal complex s...

Marijuana and Medicine Assessing the Science Base