Assessment and evaluation of science process skills in secondary school biology laboratories

Awareness of the importance of process skills in science education has increased, but practical methods of assessing student performance of these skills has received minimal attention. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how student science process skills may be accurately and reliably measured and evaluated.; A set of laboratory activities that emphasized process skills was developed by 12 science educators from the western New York area who were participants in a summer institute sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. These innovative laboratory activities were designed to be used in existing secondary school biology courses by students of different ages and ability levels. Student performance in the four general process categories of planning, performing, reasoning, and communicating was broken down into twenty specific, individual science process skills deemed important to science education. Nine teacher developers used these twelve activities, entirely and/or partially with their high school biology students during the 1995-1996 school year.; Two types of assessment instruments were developed and field-tested for the purpose of evaluating student self evaluation and performance of the twenty individual science process skills. The first was an inventory that asked for the students' self-evaluation of their abilities to perform each of the twenty process skills based on the current year's laboratory experiences. The second was a set of three performance tasks which assessed the twenty skills and were to be completed by the students in a laboratory setting under supervision of their classroom teacher and the researcher.; During May and early June, 1996, the student self-evaluation inventory and the three performance tasks were administered to 94 students of teachers in 6 schools who developed and used the activities (HH95, experimental group) and to 126 students of teachers in 9 schools that did not use the activities (HH96, control group). All schools were in the western New York region and of diverse demographics. Scoring, according to the rubrics developed by this researcher, by two independent raters had an overall agreement of 93.8%. Comparisons within and between the experimental and control groups were made based on the self-evaluation inventories and the results of the performance tasks.; Students who used the specially developed process skills activities, the HH95 experimental group, demonstrated statistically better performance in skill category III, Reasoning, than the HH96 control group. The experimental group performed better on 15 of the 20 individual process skills. On the self evaluation inventory, the HH96 control students rated themselves statistically higher than the HH95 experimental group for their total performance ability as well as in skill categories I, Planning, and II, Performing. The correlation of the combined groups as to self evaluation and skill performance was +0.30, which was significant at the 0.05 level, and indicated a general agreement between student ability to demonstrate science process skills and student self evaluation.