Investigating the use of technology enhanced assessment to reduce demographic gaps in attainment in physics.

This project seeks to address demographic gaps in attainment in physics; these mean that not only are certain groups of students, e.g. those of particular gender, socio-economic group or ethnicity or with a disability, considerably less likely to study the subject at higher education level, but also that those who do study have lower levels of retention in completing and passing their studies. This contributes to the "leaky pipeline" whereby the percentage of students and workers in particular demographic groups declines further and further. Various factors have been hypothesised as contributing to these discrepancies in attainment, in particular evidence is emerging that different students respond differently to different assessment tasks and to different features within the tasks (Dawkins et al., 2017).
Particular themes will:
(1) Develop and evaluate a tool that seeks to develop problem-solving skills and to help students to "self-scaffold", based on earlier unpublished work (see Bolton & Ross, 1997, for context). This is in response to the finding, at two very different universities, that open-ended questions with minimal scaffolding result in particularly large attainment gaps (Gibson et al, 2015; Dawkins et al, 2017).
(2) Further explore the vastly different gender gaps in attainment on different types interactive computer-marked assessment question (Jordan et al., 2017) and extend this work to consider other differences between other demographic groups.
(3) Investigate the affordances of sophisticated computer-marked assessment for students with disabilities (Bell, 2009).