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Domain-Specific Assessment: Bringing The Classroom Into Community College Accountability

Louise Yarnall, Sara Carriere, Larry Gallagher, Geneva Haertel, Patrik Lundh, Tina Stanford, Yukie Toyama

The term "domain-specific" comes from cognitive science research that distinguishes between general reasoning skills and reasoning that depends on knowledge specific to a domain. Such research characterizes and theorizes the cognitive structure of expert knowledge and the processes experts use to navigate this structure to arrive at optimal solutions to problems. Domain-Specific Assessment seeks to measure student progress in learning to reason in optimal ways about a variety of problems unique to a specific domain of study or work.

Our initial domains are biology and economics, fields chosen for their appeal to large numbers of undergraduates and contrasting qualities as domains. A fundamental step in our work involves identifying those ideas from the domains of biology and economics that fundamentally change reasoning. These ideas are nonintuitive and hard-won through generations of study and refinement.

Domain-Specific Assessment builds on evidence-centered design principles, developed at the Educational Testing Service by Mislevy, Steinberg, and Almond, and the Principled Assessment Designs for Inquiry (PADI) project, a patented online technology that methodically structures the design of complex multi-step and open-ended assessment tasks. Through these we can more effectively create assessment tasks that focus on the outcomes we seek to measure. First, we analyze the structure of knowledge in a domain. Second, we model the knowledge and reasoning skills that are unique to the domain and reasonable for college sophomores to have learned. Third, we develop templates for the assessment tasks.

Domain-Specific Assessment combines the expertise of researchers at SRI International, the University of Maryland, and Foothill College, California. Additionally, the project involves independent advisors, consultants, and industry experts that provide insights in learning outcomes, assessment and our focus domains. Together these partners are designing, developing, and testing a set of new assessment tasks intended to measure knowledge that is central to innovative thinking in diverse domains.

3/2008 - 2/2012 (current)