Assessing student understanding of physical hydrology

Abstract

Abstract. Our objective is to characterize and assess upper division and graduate student thinking in hydrology. We accomplish this through development and testing of an assessment tool for a physical hydrology class. Students were asked to respond to two questions that probed understanding and one question that assessed their ability to apply their knowledge. Student and expert responses to the questions were then used to develop a rubric to score responses. Using the rubric, three researchers independently blind-coded the full set of pre and post artifacts, resulting in 89% inter-rater agreement on the pre-tests and 83% agreement on the post-tests. This result has limitations, including the small number of participants who were all from one institution and the fact that the rubric was still under development. Nevertheless, the high inter-rater agreement from a group of experts is significant; the rubric we developed is a potentially useful tool for assessment of learning and understanding physical hydrology.