The development of an instructional and assessment tool from student work on a Model-Eliciting Activity

Model-Eliciting Activities (MEAs) are interdisciplinary, engineering based problems set in a realistic context with a client. MEAs allow researchers and teachers to observe students' development of conceptual models as they go through the cycle of express, test, and revise with their solutions. MEAs are being used increasingly in K-College level classes. Research tools that can be used for instruction and assessment with MEAs are needed. This paper will describe the development of such a research tool. Cognitive Task Analysis was used to create a task model that details the subtasks necessary to complete the MEA successfully. The task model can identify the knowledge, thought processes, and goals that underlie a task. High school students' work from an MEA was coded on each of the subtasks based on three categories of naïve, routine, or sophisticated. The development of the task model and its subsequent use for the analysis of student work on the MEA provides information relevant for researchers and teachers. Benefits of developing a task model for an MEA for teachers include having a tool for assessing student work, as well as being able to provide timely feedback to students when they are working on the MEA. The benefits for researchers include having a better understanding of students' problem solving procedures and being able to identify student misconceptions and different STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) constructs.