After her training in using the VALUE rubrics, Mullaney gathered nine faculty members on her campus to be the core of the two-year college's project group. They were previously unfamiliar with the rubrics, she says, but together they "went through them with a fine-toothed comb" and agreed "that these rubrics do represent an accurate way to assess these skills." The professors brought in their own (and their colleagues') assignments to see how well (or poorly) they aligned with the rubrics, Mullaney said. "Sometimes their assignments were missing things, but they could easily add them in and make them better."
The last step of the process at the institutional level, she said, was gathering a representative sample of student work, so that it came from all of CCRI's four campuses and 18 different disciplines, and mirrored the gender, racial and ethnic demographics and age of the community college's student body. Similar efforts went on at the other 60-odd campuses.
Jonathan Becker on 17 May 16"The Science through Technology Enhanced Play project (STEP) engages 6-8 year old students in a series of playful inquiry activities situated within a Augmented Reality environment. Tested at two schools and across two very different science topics-states of matter and the complex system of honey bee pollination-we have pioneered a new way for young students to engage in scientific inquiry and modeling in developmentally appropriate ways that breaks the mold of one-student-one computer. The big idea of STEP is to engage young children in an activity they are experts at, socio-dramatic play, in such a way that play becomes a form of scientific modeling and collective inquiry."
