MOSART-LS: Misconceptions Oriented, Standards-based Assessment Resource for Teachers in the Life Sciences
Description
The primary goal of MOSART-LS is to assist MSP Institutes to evaluate the effects of their professional development activities and other interventions on teacher participants and their students. The assessment items were derived from the National Research Council's (NRC) National Science Education Content Standards for K8 life science and from the research on science misconceptions. The project was conducted to produce and validate the K-4 assessments and then the 5-8 assessment Using classical test theory we calculated for the K-4 (ES) and 5-8 (MS) field tests:Item difficulty (proportion answering correctly)
Item discrimination (relation between item correctness & total score)
Misconception strength (proportion of incorrect responses given to the most popular distractor)
Teacher subject matter knowledge, SMK (proportion correct)
Teacher pedagogical content knowledge, PCK (fraction of items for which the most common wrong answer was accurately predicted)
The graphs on the poster show the results from the field tests. Item parameter graphs display one data-point for each test item. Teacher knowledge graphs show bubble area proportional to the number of participating teachers