COLLABORATIVE DEVELOPMENT OF PLACE-BASED, CULTURALLY INFORMED GEOSCIENCE ASSESSMENT

We present a mixed-methods approach to community-based assessment design that engages Tribal College faculty, students, and science educators as well as experts in cultural knowledge from the Blackfeet and Navajo Nations. Information from cultural experts, gathered through a combination of Delphi surveys and focus group sessions, was analyzed to identify important themes with regard to assessment and geoscience content within the context of these communities. Surveys completed by Tribal College faculty and students provided information on the themes of geoscience, Native science, place, and culture. Data gathered from the Delphi, focus group and faculty-student surveys offer the basis for developing place-based and culturally informed geoscience assessment, and reveal geoscience content that is important to the local community. Feedback from these community members will ultimately speak to the cultural validity of new and existing geoscience assessment. Results from the research suggest that while experts use a variety of assessment approaches in their classrooms, only two or three approaches are found to be “most valuable”. The experts indicated that their primary use of assessment was to gauge student understanding, monitor student progress, steer instruction and prepare students for success. Experts differed on their views regarding sources of bias in testing. The way in which assessments are used is seen as a strong source of bias and the language used on assessments is seen as a lesser, yet still important, source. Experts indicate that incorporating local context into testing practice is a mechanism for combating bias. Experts provided a variety of examples of important geoscience concepts that focused on: respect for Earth, incorporation of Native language, composition of Earth materials, maps and the physical landscape (e.g., landforms, rivers), natural processes, natural resources, and technology. In addition to information provided by the cultural experts, Tribal College faculty and students listed concepts that incorporated the environment and ecosystems, as well as concepts related to weather and climate, suggesting that important geoscience concepts should be derived from an Earth systems science approach.