How do you develop an assessment? The National Academies report Knowing What Students Know describes “assessments as an evidentiary argument” (2002). The National Academies outlines an assessment as containing three things: “(1) a model of student cognition and learning in the domain, (2) a set of beliefs about the kinds of observations that will provide evidence of students’ competencies, and (3) an interpretation process for making sense of the evidence”(2001). This is dubbed the assessment triangle. Similarly, in a process called evidence-centered assessment design (ECD), assessment is an evidence-generating tool which can be used to make claims about learning. So, the assessment triangle but more in-depth? I don’t know. Mislevy et al. put forth this design process in 2003, where they commented that although assessments are “embedded in a cultural setting and address social purposes both stated and implicit,” therefore resulting variability, all assessments involve “reasoning that relates the particular things students say or do to what they know or can do as more broadly conceived.” Assessment should serve the learning process, and if the purpose of learning is to learn something useful (such that knowledge will be put to use at a later date), assessment should promote the use of knowledge in future useful contexts. I believe this is referred to as transfer.
Three-dimensional learning (3DL) is something which may help transfer their knowledge to different contexts. I say may and not can because I am unaware of any link between 3DL and transfer; however, empirical evidence we have and the theories we use do point us in that direction, or so I feel justified in claiming. Looking at the assessment triangle, our observation (the assessment & student evidence) is informed by your theory of cognition. 3DL is not a theory of cognition, but it is an activity we are asking our students to engage in, ultimate, to promote expert-like understanding. 3DL is what we are looking for or the observations we hope to make. The expert-novice paradigm is more cognitive theory-like and informs both 3DL and the resources perspective, which is a theory of cognition.
What is a three-dimensional assessment? An assessment which has the potential to elicit evidence of students engaging with the three dimensions (Laverty at el. 2016). Why only potential? There is no guarantee an assessment will engage a student in 3DL. As we know, the structure of the prompt can have an impact on a student’s response. It is possible that students’ resources were not activated, even though they have the productive resources to understand the concept the assessment is testing for (Stowe and Cooper, 2019). So how does one develop a 3DL assessment? Follow ECD. This is an iterative process that involves defining three things: the construct to be assessed (the claim of student understanding), the evidence needed to claim understanding and how that evidence will be interpreted (rubric, item response theory, etc.), and the task designed to elicit that evidence. The construct is defined using the learning objectives and specifies what you want students to know and be able to do, and exactly how you want them to know or be able to do those things. This is where three dimensions enter the picture. In 3DL, students are asked to predict, explain, or model phenomenon; students are using their knowledge in direct relation to a phenomenon. This promotes expert-like understanding had has the potential to provide stronger evidence about student understanding than other popular assessments which ask students to calculate or simply know facts.
JLS
References
Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment. (2001). National Academies Press.
Laverty, J. T., Underwood, S. M., Matz, R. L., Posey, L. A., Carmel, J. H., Caballero, M. D., Fata-Hartley, C. L., Ebert-May, D., Jardeleza, S. E., & Cooper, M. M. (2016). Characterizing College Science Assessments: The Three-Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol. PLOS ONE, 11(9), e0162333.
Mislevy, R. J., Steinberg, L. S., & Almond, R. G. (2003). Focus Article: On the Structure of Educational Assessments. Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research & Perspective, 1(1), 3–62.
Stowe, R. L., & Cooper, M. M. (2019). Assessment in Chemistry Education. Israel Journal of Chemistry.