Central Valley Region Interdisciplinary Symposium on Education Research

In an undergraduate introductory physics lab course, it is crucial that students receive an opportunity to acquire laboratory and research skills that they will take with them as they move through academia to the workplace. Lab questions are addressed in each student’s lab notebook. The goals, assignment questions and rubric criteria for a class can be assigned levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, a hierarchical model that describes learning into distinct categories. In this study when the components of the class, lab objectives, questions, and rubric criteria, were not on the same level of Bloom’s this was considered as misalignment. This was done for four different labs from the Fall 2021 semester at UC Merced, two of which were based on app-based data collection and two that were hands on data collection using circuits available to or made by students. For the three components, two were compared at a time for alignment giving three total analyses, objectives to questions, objectives to the rubric criteria and questions compared to the rubric criteria. The goals were (1) to determine if alignment exists between these three components, and (2) where is this misalignment happening as well as if it is independent between the three components. Using this analysis, it was determined that there is misalignment in the course, and that some of the labs are aligned in certain aspects such as between objectives and questions while being misaligned when comparing objectives to the rubric criteria. Out of all the different components the rubric was the one which had the most misalignments, demonstrating the need for changes to ensure students are graded fairly. For future semesters the rubric needs adjustment so that the students can be graded on content they are asked to produce with the notebook content as evidence that they fulfilled these goals.

Jarod Cortez, Teaching Assistant, UC Merced