Project Activities
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Products and publications
Product: In this project, the team developed a performance-based lab for the high school level. The Inq-ITS Performance Based Labs for High School Physics and Physical Science integrates "using mathematics" practices with other science practices to study physics/physical science phenomena. An accompanying teacher dashboard generates immediate, diagnostic, and actionable alerts driven by algorithms that assess how students integrate using mathematics practices during their virtual investigations. Teachers use the insights gleaned from the immediate alerts to inform individual and whole classroom instructional practices. Resources support the alignment of the labs to learning goals and assist with implementation.
Supplemental information
In Phase II, the team expanded the product to 20 labs and expanded its capacity to assess how students integrate "using mathematics" practices. Specifically, the team developed new algorithms to auto-score how students make predictions with mathematics, built new lab activities, integrated new the assessments into the teacher alerting dashboard, and completed iterative research to inform refinements.
A pre-post pilot study was conducted at the end of Phase II with 4 educators and 236 students. Results demonstrated the usability and feasibility of the labs, as implementation occurred as planned. Results also demonstrated that students improved from pre- to post- test at graphing and making predictions with mathematical models with prompts from educators. A randomized controlled trial that had been planned was not able to be employed at the conclusion of Phase II due to challenges causes by the COVID19 pandemic.
Questions about this project?
To answer additional questions about this project or provide feedback, please contact the program officer.
