Thank you for viewing our video! We are in the fifth year of this project called ELIPSS (Enhancing Learning by Improving Process Skills in STEM). Initially, we developed rubrics to assess process skills, and now we’re enhancing these efforts by optimizing ways to provide feedback to students and instructors. We’re interested in hearing your thoughts about how you assess these transferable  skills, how you provide feedback to students, and what resources you would need to implement the ELIPSS rubrics. Particularly ...

• In what ways does this video give you ideas about how to assess skills in your courses?
• How could STEM instructors provide effective feedback to students about their process skill development?
• In what ways could you change your courses (activities and/or facilitation) to encourage process skill development?

Hi, Renee,

Thanks to you and the team for the great video. I had heard about ELIPSS several years ago at an ACS meeting. It would be interesting to ask students to record themselves solving problems aloud and then apply the process skills rubrics. In this era of online teaching, that could be a way to interact and give feedback to students.

I am curious in your experience how students react to the feedback they get from these rubrics when it is provided? I have observed that sometimes students don't know how to use or value feedback on their work when it is provided, whether it is grades or comments or other types of information from instructors or peers.

Thanks again for your work!

I also have a question related to the transition to online learning given the situation in which we find ourselves. Do you have recommendations for how we might scale this to online courses? Looking forward to a fun discussion, thanks!

Hi Shirley,

The notion of having students record themselves engaging in a skill and then applying the rubric to the video is a really interesting idea. That would be a good idea for an implementation to study, particularly this summer or for the fall. 

The student reactions to feedback has been mixed (as you note) between generally ignoring feedback and using it to inform future practice. When faculty have a mechanism to encourage reflection we've seen better outcomes.

Hi Sara,

We're currently developing a web-based version of the rubrics. They were originally intended for live classes, but they should allow us to assess student groups in online settings as well. After an instructor or TA fills out the digital rubrics, all students in the group will receive an email with their scores and feedback. We're still in the early testing phases, but hopefully the web-based rubrics will be ready for wider testing in the fall.

I think you have captured and tapped into an important element of STEM disciplines and majors that is valued, but which is sometimes hard to focus on in a STEM class.  Using rubrics has been a useful strategy in many other disciplines--I'm thinking of writing classes (both general education and technical writing), and other subjects.  Have you engaged any colleagues outside of the STEM disciplines to review your instruments, to offer insights or feedback to the process of the development of the rubric?  I'm always looking for ways to "cross over" between hard sciences and the social sciences and humanities--I think there is a lot to learn when we cross those bridges.

This is great! Working on a project on a field-wide learning framework, and soft skills are those that cut across all positions. Can't wait to look at these and see how we might be able to build on and use the amazing work you've done!  THANKS!

This is such an interesting project! These rubrics and feedback forms are so versatile and provide students with insight into their process skills that are too often glossed over. I believe that these documents would be beneficial when providing feedback to students for any kind of assignment. I think there may be a potential to build on the metacognitive aspect through having students submit a reflection on previous feedback with plans to address areas of weakness in future work. These reflections may enable students to iteratively work on these skills and be able to see explicit improvement as they progress through the course. I think this work is very beneficial to STEM teachers and am interested in potentially applying the documents to my projects as well. Thank you for sharing this video!

Such thoughtful and detailed work! Thank you for sharing it here. If you were working with a medium-sized chemistry program interested in improving the development of student skills, where would you suggest that they start?

Thank you for sharing your project! I will be looking into using the rubric in my future classes.

Would you be available for a short zoom presentation to the STEM faculty?

Well done. I agree with many of the comments above which highlight the importance of these skills in this field. Feedback is a critical component that is too often overlooked or implemented at a time when there are not adequate time to address improve noted areas for growth. I appreciate the implementation of feedback throughout the process as it lends to a more tailored approach to learning.  I can also appreciate the accommodations you have made to transition to an online platform as it speaks to your adaptability to current needs.

I'm interested in knowing what aspect of this five year project has been most meaningful to you. What evidences have you seen that make you to believe that you have made an impact on the field?

The primary evidence for impact on the field has been the change in instructional practices of the faculty who have adopted and implemented the rubrics. Explicitly assessing process skills and paying attention to how learning materials and classroom facilitation support students in developing them has resulted in many faculty revising course materials and how they make skills visible in the classroom. In the case studies we've done with intentional implementation, we see improvements in student skills as well.

I attended an ELIPSS workshop at BCCE two years ago. Learning about this project helped me realize that process skills are an integral part of the classes I teach - I just hadn't been articulating that to my students. Since attending that workshop, I've been much more explicit about explaining this to students.

I've used the Interpersonal Communication and Teamwork rubrics in a team-based class where we are now explicit that these are skills we want students to improve on. I don't have any data other than personal observation, but my co-instructor and I felt that students were working better by the end of the semester than any other term that we'd taught the course. Now that we're more familiar with the rubrics, we intend to more fully use them in our class this fall (which may be online) and will ask the students to reflect more on their skill development.

Hi Hiller - as we are moving further into the use of reflection in our curriculum, I'm eager to give this kind of iterative reflection a try.  Great suggestion!

This is a much needed program that I suspect will have a quick uptake in the coming years as universities and industry begin to focus on these areas more/

It's so great that your project is contributing rich resources based on well designed research. Regarding process skills, I wonder if you could give some insights into how you consider process skills to be related to the "science practices" that have been articulated in the K-12 domain (Framework and NGSS). I think the relationships between process skills at university level to practices that are being increasingly emphasized in K-12 are going to become increasingly more important as students move through the educational continuum into university.