Assessing student understanding of physical hydrology

摘要

Our objective is to devise a mechanism to characterize and assess upperdivision and graduate student thinking in hydrology. We accomplish thisthrough development and testing of an assessment tool for a physicalhydrology class. The instrument was piloted in two sections of a physicalhydrology course. Students were asked to respond to two questions thatprobed understanding and one question that assessed their ability to applytheir knowledge, both prior to and after the course. Student and expertresponses to the questions were classified into broad categories to developa rubric to score responses. Using the rubric, three researchersindependently blind-coded the full set of pre- and post-artifacts, resultingin 89% inter-rater agreement on the pre-tests and 83% agreement on thepost-tests. The majority of responses made by students at the beginning ofthe class were characterized as showing only recognition of hydrologyconcepts from a non-physical perspective; post surveys indicated that themajority had moved to a basic understanding of physical processes, with somestudents achieving expert understanding. Our study has limitations,including the small number of participants who were all from one institutionand the fact that the rubric was still under development. Nevertheless, thehigh inter-rater agreement from a group of experts indicates that theprocess we undertook is potentially useful for assessment of learning andunderstanding physical hydrology.