Journal, reflections

How do you think your study will compare/build on other investigations of the impact of prior student ability/experience/aptitude/interest on success in science courses? There is a considerable literature on these aspects of success - particularly for introductory bio/chem/physics. One other factor that has been shown to have a profound effect is participation - particularly attendence. I'm assuming that you will track this as well. Just a thought.

The informal logic skills tests that you described sound very interesting Didem, I'd like to know more about them if I may.
cheers Chris

You are proposing collecting A LOT of data. It might be valuable to narrow slightly your data set--either collect all of these for one topic, or collect a few of these for multiple topics.

building your initial pre-test may be labor intensive (especially if it's multiple choice). So, you may want to have the pretests all be short answer (your logic puzzle and bio/chem pre)

consider post tests as well edited 07:49, 19 Jul 2008

Questions: how do your assessment goals explicitly relate to your course learning objectives? Do your students know what those learning objectives are, and do your class learning objectives drive the data you collect and the decisions you make about what's important? Also, I am not at all clear about what your experimental design is. I'm worried that you're collecting a lot of data without thinking about the experimental design objectives: what desicions you want to make, how will you tie outcomes to the decisions and actions you make about those outcomes? It's still not clear to me but it could very well be my unfamiliarity with your subject.

As far as collection of data, I think you might want a deeper analysis of one area of understanding, either at the analysis level or the synthesis level. If they don't have the factual knowledge, I think that will show up in a lack of analysis or synthesis. Remember to think about what you are actually wanting to assess here, so that your data analysis is relevant! :)

I think that you need to clearly express what the students should be able to achieve from your class. Then you can determine whether or not they achieve this outcome. Then your baseline data may be able to tease out the reason for failure or success. If you think that for example, analytic capacity is the most important, then I think that you need to have this clearly in mind when you decide on the format of data that you will collect. It is a good idea I agree to think about what the students are bringing to the course and whether or not the prerequisites are necessary.
cheers Chris