Measuring Literacy, Attitudes, and Capacities to Solve Societal Problems

Effective assessments offer more than just a measurement of learning. When sequenced and aligned to evidence-based curriculum, assessments can facilitate learning and inform instruction. The Interdisciplinary Teaching about Earth for a Sustainable Future (InTeGrate) project viewed assessment as a core strategy of the curriculum being developed. InTeGrate used a community-based approach to assessment. An assessment team engaged with materials development teams to facilitate module and course assessment design, developed common instruments to assess student learning, analyzed student data from pilot tests to inform curriculum revisions, and used the findings to fine-tune assessment instruments and to shed light on opportunities for faculty development within the geoscience education community. The community approach ensured high-quality curricula and assessments and strategies to investigate learning at the module, course, and project level. Perhaps more importantly, the approach increased the capacity of the geoscience education community by harnessing the expertise from within the community to promote a culture of evaluative thinking.