Evaluating the New Secondary Informatics Curriculum in The Netherlands:The Teachers’ Perspective

Since the introduction of Informatics as an elective course in secondary education in the Netherlands in 1998, the implemented curriculum is being regularly monitored. The results of the large 2013 secondary Informatics teachers survey contributed to the revision of the Informatics curriculum. This revised curriculum came into effect in 2019. In line with regular curriculum monitoring practices, the Netherlands Institute for Curriculum Development is polling the secondary Informatics teachers to understand their views and opinions on the intended curriculum and to learn about their implemented curriculum The results indicate that the majority of the respondents find the new Informatics curriculum better than the old one and that it offers a solid foundation for their teaching practice. A minority either misses some content in the curriculum or considers it overloaded with content, and some find it not to be up to date. Furthermore, the results of this survey are compared to the results of the 2013 survey to assess to what extent the new Informatics curriculum meets the teachers’ needs and recommendations better.</p

Development of a formative assessment instrument to determine students’ need for corrective actions in physics:Identifying students’ functional level of understanding

In physics education, most teachers provide students feedback on their problem solutions through grades on written tests. The practice of feedback after a summative test does not often meet the needs of many students to improve their problem solving. In this paper we report on the development of a formative assessment instrument to allow teachers to provide more meaningful action-oriented feedback on students’ performance on written tests.Our research and development approach comprised three phases.The first phase consisted of a literature guided cognitive analysis of effective problem-solving strategies in the physics domain. This analysis resulted in the identification of three crucial episodes in students’ problem-solving approaches during which students engage in specific cognitive activities. The second phase consisted of the design of an assessment instrument to monitor specific cognitive activities during the three crucial episodes when solving physics problems. This resulted in a rating scale with 11 levels to indicate students’ efficacy. The third phase consisted of research of the validity, reliability, and practicality of the instrument. Here we trained three teachers to trace students’ mistakes on different problems in the domain of kinematics and asked them to rate the mastery of 16 eleventh-grade pre-university students. In this phase we assessed the reliability and validity of this instrument by computing Krippendorff's alpha to indicate teachers’ inter-rater reliability. Practicality of the instrument was assessed by examining the variation in students’ level of mastery on problems of different complexity. Further research is needed to provide more detailed guidelines for how teachers can use the instrument in formative assessment (in contrast to summative assessment) to help students to develop correct solution methods and foster students’ metacognition about problem solving in related physics areas (i.e., knowledge transfer)

Think aloud: using cognitive interviewing to validate the PISA assessment of student self-efficacy in mathematics

Cognitive interviewing (CI) provides a method of systematically collecting validity evidence of response processes for questionnaire items. CI involves a range of techniques for prompting individuals to verbalise their responses to items. One such technique is concurrent verbalisation, as developed in Think Aloud Protocol (TAP). This article investigates the value of the technique for validating questionnaire items administered to young people in international surveys. To date, the literature on TAP has focused on allaying concerns about reactivity – whether response processes are affected by thinking aloud. This article investigates another concern, namely the completeness of concurrent verbalisations – the extent to which respondents verbalise their response processes. An independent, exploratory validation of the PISA assessment of student self-efficacy in mathematics by a small international team of researchers using CI with concurrent verbalisation in four education systems (England, Estonia, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands) provided the basis for this investigation. The researchers found that students generally thought aloud in response to each of the items, thereby providing validity evidence of responses processes varying within and between the education systems, but that practical steps could be taken to increase the completeness of concurrent verbalisations in future validations