An Assessment Rubric for Future Teachers’ Ability to Design Experiments

Designing an experiment is a challenging task for most learners. In this work, we are proposing the use of a rubric for the assessment of future Teachers’ ability to design experiments. The rubric comprises 6 dimensions and 3 levels of success of the learners’ designs and is administered as a paper & pencil task. Learners are asked to answer various problems, by designing relevant experiments using Worksheets, that are specially designed to match the dimensions of the rubric, facilitating the data collection. Results from a pilot study revealed that using this assessment scheme we were able to detect the learners’ difficulties in forming a hypothesis and in manipulating variables, and we were also able to identify possible reasons related to these difficulties. This rubric can easily be applied to a variety of educational conditions, functioning not only as a formative assessment tool for the teachers, but also as a scaffold for learners monitoring their own development.