Author(s):
SkillBuilder Project: Developing strategies for providing scalable and actionable feedback to students on professional skill development
The goal of the SkillBuilder project is to help students develop and improve their professional skills in STEM classrooms by using a scalable digital platform based on novel feedback-based skill rubrics from the Enhancing Learning by Improving Process Skills project (ELIPSS.com). This project will conduct research on how feedback and self-assessment can help students improve their professional skills, and examine how external and tailored feedback can help students become self-regulated learners. The project team is designing and piloting a digital platform to streamline assessment and actionable feedback delivery to students, using a multidisciplinary team of STEM instructors from a range of class sizes and institutional settings to ensure the application’s utility and adoptability. Through interviews and survey responses, instructional team members will identify the optimum strategies for generating and delivering feedback to students that is both impactful and timely. Data will be collected on the ways in which students interact with the suggestions for improvement on skill development; these data will be analyzed to gauge how they responded to this feedback and whether it helped them improve their skills. Students will complete a validated science motivation questionnaire to collect their insights on how their development of professional skills may further motivate them towards STEM majors and careers.
Culminating outcomes for this project include 1) a digital platform, which is preloaded with customizable professional skills rubrics that were a product of the NSF-funded ELIPSS project; 2) a team of instructors from a range of STEM disciplines and institutions across the country who implement and subsequently disseminate these materials; 3) a set of materials and training protocols to train additional instructors to use the skill-building rubrics and digital platform; 4) a collection of best instructional practices to optimize student interaction with feedback on their professional skill development; and 5) an advanced understanding of how these efforts impact students – promoting their skill development, their perception of the importance of these skills for scientists, and their preparation for STEM careers.
Overall, the broader impacts of this project include enabling greater integration of professional skill development into undergraduate STEM programs – the digital platform and classroom strategies are designed to be used in all disciplines, class sizes, and institutional settings and will rapidly impact a large number of students. These students will enter the STEM workforce with key preparation in the sought-after professional skills that will help ensure their success. The tools and classroom strategies gained through this project will support the advancement of STEM education on a number of levels: they support active learning pedagogies, support skill-based programmatic assessment, and provide a data-collection mechanism for future education research.
To date, the alpha version of SkillBuilder has been designed through an interactive process with the cross-disciplinary STEM faculty team. A set of use cases for professional skill assessment has been formulated and distributed among a range of STEM educators to initiate implementation planning; this use case approach has been found to be a very successful strategy in planning assessment implementation strategies.
Coauthors
Suzanne Ruder, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA
