Assessments are an invaluable tool that PEER Physics teachers may use to guide instructional decisions and provide feedback to students about content understanding and engagement in the scientific practices. The PEER Physics suite includes three types of assessments — three-dimensional performance assessments, engineering design challenges, and traditional assessment banks — to meet the different assessment needs in a PEER Physics classroom.
These short performance assessments provide teachers with resources to gauge student proficiency on physics principles, crosscutting concepts, and scientific practices. Not only do these assessments provide teachers with a more comprehensive measurement of student understanding, but they also allow students to be assessed in ways that parallel the pedagogical approach in a PEER Physics classroom. Instructors may implement these as group or individual assessments, depending on the instructor’s assessment objectives. Each PEER Physics Three Dimensional Assessment also includes a grading rubric and review questions.
PEER Physics Engineering Design Challenges are classroom or take-home projects in which students use physics principles to solve a real-world problem. These projects are carefully designed for students to apply their understanding of physics principles throughout each step of the the engineering design process: brainstorming, designing, testing, analyzing, and optimizing. Each PEER Physics Engineering Design Challenge also includes a storyline hook that instructors may use to introduce the associated chapter.
The PEER Physics Assessment Banks provide teachers with traditional content-based assessment questions that are designed to assess student understanding of the key ideas that are developed throughout each activity. Formative and summative assessment play an important role in the PEER Physics classroom for informing responsive instructional decisions and for providing students with detailed feedback. These assessment banks were designed in collaboration with PEER Physics instructors and they are based on educational research on the Assessment Pyramid, carefully incorporating three levels of thinking (reproduction, connections, and analysis) across physics domains (Shafer and Foster, 1997).
