Skills such as critical thinking, information processing, and written communication are frequently cited as intended learning outcomes for undergraduate STEM degree programs, including ACS-approved Bachelor’s Degree Programs. However, these skills are rarely the focus of student tasks or explicitly assessed in classrooms. This lack of constructive alignment between the intended learning outcomes, tasks, and assessments can lead to different outcomes in the enacted curriculum. The Enhancing Learning by Improving Process Skills in STEM (ELIPSS) Project has developed generalizable rubrics to assess these skills across STEM disciplines along with faculty development workshops to support optimal use of the rubrics. The rubrics are intended to provide feedback to individual students about the development of their skills and to instructors about the effectiveness of their instructional strategies in supporting the students’ skill development. These resources have been created and refined using a design-based research methodology with a multidisciplinary collaborative team to ensure the rubrics’ validity, reliability, and utility for multiple STEM disciplines, institution types, and course levels. The development process used to create the resources will be discussed, including how faculty incorporated the rubrics into their courses to assess and provide feedback to students and how feedback from the faculty to the research team informed changes to the rubrics and workshops.

Resources to assess critical thinking, information processing, and written communication skills in undergraduate STEM courses

255th National Meeting (2018)

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