The development of a coding scheme analyzing formative assessment in undergraduate engineering science courses

This research paper addresses responsive teaching, which is a particular form of formative assessment that instructors use to understand and respond to the “disciplinary engagement” of students in real-time during instruction While ideas about what constitutes “disciplinary engagement” are established in science education where responsive teaching has received considerably study, the field of engineering has not yet established a clear idea of what “disciplinary engagement” means-particularly in engineering science courses, which we define as the technical courses at the sophomore or junior level that are non-lab and non-design courses. In this paper we make progress toward an understanding of disciplinary engagement-and therefore responsive teaching-in engineering science courses by focusing on the content that an instructor elicits, notices, and responds to during in-class formative assessment. We first discuss the development and final version of a coding scheme that classifies the content that an instructor elicits, notices, and responds to during question-initiated dialogue. The main focus of this coding scheme is a set of four codes that describe different content being invited by a question or offered as a statement: 1) a number of definition, 2) mathematical reasoning or process, and scientific or engineering reasoning related to either 3) a specific example being discussed in class or 4) the course content outside of a specific example. We conclude the paper by presenting an example of how coded question-initiated dialogue can be analyzed to investigate the type of content being discussed by the instructor and the students. Analyzing two different engineering science courses, we find that one course featured more students and instructor questions addressing science and engineering reasoning, which maps to our expectations of the course based on our observations of them.