Educational Assessment and Physics Lab Courses: What to Consider when Designing Assessment

Recent research on physics instructional labs for undergraduate education has highlighted many factors that increase the quailty of teaching and learning e.g. the focus on learning outcomes related to experimental skills and the inclusion of open-ended elements in the lab tasks. But as lab instruction is moving forward, what is the situation with educational assessment of lab work - is it moving forward as well? Generally, the research on educational assessment has highlighted to need to conduct also formative assessment i.e. assessment for learning, alongside with the summative assessment, i.e. assesment of learning. Research has also focused on the possible benefits of self and peer assessment alongside with the teacher assessment. But have these suggestions made it through to physics instructional labs?

In my presentation, I will present the results of a literature review focusing on educational assessment of labs. The review focused on studies published between the years 2000 and 2022. As the number of studies concentrating on physics instructional labs was quite small, we chose to include also chemistry education studies to the review. Through a screening process, 34 journal articles were chosen for the review.

The results show that 50 % of the studies concentrated at least partly on the assessment of experimental skills, 33 % on content knowledge and 24 % on so-called "metaskills" such as team work. Almost all of the studies concentrated on at least partly on summative assessment and 59 % of studies focusing on at least partly on formative assessment. The most common form of formative assessment was feedback from the teachers or TAs that was given to a draft or the final product, e.g. lab report. 94 % of the reviewed studies focused on asessment conducted by a teacher or a TA with 23 % and 21 % focusing on self and peer assessment, respectively.

All in all, research on educational assessment and labs emphasizes assessment that is summative, teacher-led, and focuses on experimental skills and content knowledge. The scenery could be described with the word “traditional”. On the other hand, many of the studies presented new and experimental approaches to assessment.

Finally we propose a model for desigining educational assessment of labs where the different objectives, purposes and agents of assessment are brought together.