Process-Oriented and Product-Oriented Assessment of Experimental Skills in Physics: A Comparison

Abstract

The acquisition of experimental skills is regarded as an important part of science education. Models describing experimental skills usually distinguish between three dimensions of experimenting: prepare, perform, and evaluate. Valid assessment procedures for experimental skills have to consider all these three dimensions. Hands-on tests are especially useful in dealing with the perform dimension. However, in large-scale assessments, the scoring of students’ experimental skills is usually only based on the products of the experiments. Does this approach sufficiently account for a student’s ability to carry out experiments? On the one hand, a process-oriented approach that considers the quality of students’ actions, e.g., while setting up an experiment or measuring, provides a broader basis for assessments. On the other hand, process analyses are time-consuming. In this paper, we compare a process-oriented assessment of experimental skills that is based on videos of students’ actions in a hands-on test and their lab sheets with a product-oriented assessment that analyses only the lab sheets. Students’ scores from both assessments show high correlations in the dimensions prepare and evaluate, but only medium and low correlations in the perform dimension. Thus, process- and product-oriented analysis methods are not exchangeable in the perform dimension. Process-oriented approaches appear to be necessary for the assessment of experimental skills.