Assessment Purposes
Structured interviews may serve many functions, among them:
- to investigate how well students understand a concept; to identify misconceptions, areas of confusion, and/or gaps in understanding that may be common among a group of students;
- to document how students can apply their knowledge in concrete settings (e.g., problem solving, trouble shooting);
- to document the general and content-specific procedures that students employ in such application tasks and the sequences and manner in which these processes are employed;
- to document how student understanding and problem-solving skills change over time or with instruction; and
- to obtain verbal feedback from students about course structure, teaching techniques and other aspects of the course or program of instruction.
It is also important to note that the goal of the interview is to describe how a student understands a scientific concept or phenomenon, and not simply to provide a measurement of the degree to which this understanding approximates the scientific explanation. Thus, interviews are typically used to provide the instructor with insight about students' understandings in order to refine and target instruction ("formative assessment") rather than to evaluate the knowledge of individual students for purposes of assigning a grade ("summative assessment").
Structured interviews are used to describe individual student's understandings of a specific scientific concept or closely related groups of concepts. It is important to note, however, that the degree of understanding to be assessed will differ depending on the type of interview probe used. Can the student recognize the concept? Generate an example? Apply the concept? Use the concept to predict phenomena or solve problems? Different kinds of structured interviews measure different degrees of understanding.
Limitations
Structured interviews are used to describe individual student's understandings, and are best conducted individually with students; thus time is a major inhibiting factor in using structured interviews to inform teaching. To prevent this issue from being prohibitive, selective sampling of a broad range of students in a classroom may be employed to make the technique more practical, yet still provide a portrait of how different students in a class are engaging with course material.
A second limitation of structured interviews lies in the extreme content specificity of students' thinking. For instance, when dealing with biological knowledge, the type of organism included in an interview prompt has been shown to radically change the nature of a student's response. Thus, if an instructor would like to probe a student's reasoning pattern about a specific process (e.g., the change of coat color in response to environmental cues) the nature of the exemplar (eg. the organism) included in the probe must be taken into account (Tamir & Zohar, 1992). Similar specificity may be expected in virtually all scientific disciplines.
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