Proposal Title

InterCLASS: A short interdisciplinary Attitude Survey.

Session Type

Poster

Room

Atrium

Start Date

July 2015

Keywords

Attitudinal Surveys, Interdisciplinary, Assessment of Learning

Primary Threads

Evaluation of Learning

Abstract

Science One at the University of British Columbia is an interdisciplinary first-year science program offered to 75 students that focuses on biology, chemistry, math, and physics. One of the main goals of Science One (and other interdisciplinary programs) is to teach students to view the sciences as one subject rather than many separate disciplines. There are two things that motivate such an approach: 1) It helps students break down the barriers in thinking that prevent them from taking knowledge in one subject and transferring it to another and 2) it makes a student’s knowledge more robust.

There exist many discipline-specific surveys that measure how expert-like a student’s attitudes are towards a subject (e.g. CLASS-Phys, CLASS- Chem, CLASS-Bio, E-CLASS), but none that appropriately measure the interdisciplinary attitudes that students may possess. To address this we are developing the interdisciplinary learning attitudes survey (InterCLASS) to probe student attitudes about connections between biology, chemistry and physics. This instrument will allow the quantification of changes as a result of any interdisciplinary education students receive, either in programs like Science One, or in more typical first year settings.

An initial set of questions has been developed and administered to approximately 2000 students in first year science courses at the University of British Columbia. To measure shifts in attitudes, the survey was administered at the beginning and end of the each term. Focus groups have been held to assess student thinking and interpretation of the instrument. Expert validation of the instrument is in progress.

Elements of Engagement

The obvious thing would be to have people at the conference take fill out the version of the survey that we're going to give to experts as part of the validation process. I'm not sure how to facilitate this. Either we can hand them out at the poster, or we can hand them out near to beginning of the conference (somehow) an have people hand them in during the poster session.

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Jul 8th, 5:15 PM

InterCLASS: A short interdisciplinary Attitude Survey.

Atrium

Science One at the University of British Columbia is an interdisciplinary first-year science program offered to 75 students that focuses on biology, chemistry, math, and physics. One of the main goals of Science One (and other interdisciplinary programs) is to teach students to view the sciences as one subject rather than many separate disciplines. There are two things that motivate such an approach: 1) It helps students break down the barriers in thinking that prevent them from taking knowledge in one subject and transferring it to another and 2) it makes a student’s knowledge more robust.

There exist many discipline-specific surveys that measure how expert-like a student’s attitudes are towards a subject (e.g. CLASS-Phys, CLASS- Chem, CLASS-Bio, E-CLASS), but none that appropriately measure the interdisciplinary attitudes that students may possess. To address this we are developing the interdisciplinary learning attitudes survey (InterCLASS) to probe student attitudes about connections between biology, chemistry and physics. This instrument will allow the quantification of changes as a result of any interdisciplinary education students receive, either in programs like Science One, or in more typical first year settings.

An initial set of questions has been developed and administered to approximately 2000 students in first year science courses at the University of British Columbia. To measure shifts in attitudes, the survey was administered at the beginning and end of the each term. Focus groups have been held to assess student thinking and interpretation of the instrument. Expert validation of the instrument is in progress.