FIRST Assessment Database metadata: The course so far

The FIRST Assessment Database will allow researchers to find assessments, compare results across courses and institutions, and document and manage their assessment data. The database contains individual student responses to assessment questions linked to metadata describing the who, what, where, when, and why of the data. Faculty can use the metadata to find instruments to assess specific student learning goals and compare student responses from their own previous courses or other courses elsewhere. The database simplifies data collection for cross-institutional research or longitudinal studies of a course. The database is currently under construction and a prototype will be online in January 2009.

The metadata categories include descriptions of the place, time, instruction, instrument and student responses. The metadata are organized hierarchically from information about a course to descriptions of the question formats. Categories also include student responses and the value assigned to a given student response (i.e. correct, incorrect, and/or specific misconceptions). In addition, categories such as taxonomies of cognitive level and categories of biological concepts further classify assessment items. We will demonstrate how to use metadata in the database to search for assessments, determine learning gains in response to a teaching innovation, and evaluate the validity and reliability of an assessment. There is increasing interest among science faculty to analyze assessments and “do something” with the data. If faculty had options to compare common assessment results from within and outside their institutions, the result could influence larger-scale changes in undergraduate biology curricula.