Research Protocol

1. Research Question: How do students and teachers respond to Project Based Assessments (PBAs) compared to traditional assessments?
2. I chose this research question to base my project on because at my high school, there was a big push for teachers to assign Project Based Assessments (PBAS) over giving traditional assessments such as tests or quizzes. I want to explore this topic because I am interested in improving assessment to accurately reflect student knowledge. I would like to know how students and teachers perceive this type of assessment as compared to tests or quizzes. In high school, my classmates and teachers would complain about having to assign these projects because of the extra effort and grading that these projects required. I am interested to see how students and teachers in my specific school respond to this new type of assessment and the positives/negatives of assigning projects to measure student learning. I feel like this question is important to educators to explore and evaluate for themselves so that they can decide how to appropriate assess their students while still keeping them engaged in their learning. Weighing the pros and cons of both types of assessments, along with student input, can help teachers gauge the level of student understanding. It is often argued that written assessments only require memorization and surface level knowledge that is simply written down and promptly forgotten. According to Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom, 1956), the lowest level of cognitive understanding is remembering and understanding. The highest level of cognition includes creating a product of their learning. I am interested to see if student work accurately represents the higher levels of cognition, or if projects are given that only require remembering. I also hope to explore how teachers can make written assessments more effective for the highest levels of learning. 

2. My research site is an urban school that is part of a larger city school system. My focal participants are Ms. X, and the students in her 4th and 5th grade science class. My research site is an urban school in the south side of a city in Western Pennsylvania. I plan to interview an equal number of students in the 4th and 5th grade sections so that I could possibly compare and contrast the data. I hope to explore if there is a possible distinction between the 4th and 5th graders’ attitudes toward the assessments they are given, and if they have a preference toward PBAs or more traditional types of assessment. 

3. I hope to collect several pieces of data to explore my research question. I want to collect student assessments (without names for privacy concerns) and projects so that I can evaluate both of these assignments for effectiveness. Since I am in Teaching Science for Grades 4-8 this semester, I plan to use science assessments so that I can connect my learning and experiences from Teaching Science to Content Area Reading. I want to evaluate science projects that are given and tests/quizzes/other written assessments so that I can compare and contrast their effectiveness.   I also plan on using field notes and student/teacher interviews so that I can explore their differing or similar attitudes about the types of assessments given in the classroom. 

1. Example interview questions: 
   1. Do you prefer projects or written tests? Why?
   2. Do you feel like you learn more when you complete a project or take a written assessment? 
   3. Do you learn better by creating, or by writing?