Development Of Tools And Assessment Of Ethiopian Students Pattern Of Scientific Reasoning At The Upper Primary Level In The Hadiyya Zone

Studies indicate that the failure of science education to meet the needs of the rn21st century is to some extent due to the inability to incorporate scientific reasoning and rnhigher order assessments in the school instruction. Though the outcomes of education seek rnhigher-order thinking abilities there is a lack of high ability assessments in low-income rnnations. The purpose of this mixed methods research is to explore students’ way of reasoning rnand develop and validate the Scientific Reasoning Progress Tool (SRPT) which measures rnstudents’ reasoning abilities. The phenomenographic study was used to explore grade eight rnstudents’ patterns of reasoning, and to validate an assessment tool the descriptive survey rnmethod was used. The qualitative analysis of students’ interviews elicited three major themes rnof student views towards different levels of scientific reasoning: naïve, mixed, and scientific rnalong with the underlying ways of reasoning. For the quantitative part of the study, 40 items rnwere developed, pilot tested, and administered for 242 grade eight students at six schools. rnRasch Analysis was used to develop and validate the items with the help of Winsteps. It was rnfound that the SRPT is offered as a valid and reliable instrument that is a construct-driven, rndomain-specific, and a higher-order thinking assessment that can measure students’ reasoning rnprogress. However, it was found that the reasoning ability of grade 8 students’ is limited to rnlower level reasoning and they faced difficulty in attaining higher-level reasoning like rniv rngenerating evidence and drawing conclusions. This study has produced a valid and reliable rnassessment tool to measure students' scientific reasoning abilities and a theoretical model that rncould be used to develop assessment tools. The framework and design of this research may be rnadapted to develop additional instruments to investigate the learning progression of students’ rnscientific reasoning in middle and high school classes in Ethiopian and other low-income rncountries.

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