Assessing student understanding of physical hydrology

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

An open web‐based module developed to advance data‐driven hydrologic process learning

“…As demands on hydrologists have grown, so have calls to enhance hydrology education at the upper division and graduate levels to adequately prepare students for both research and industry (Merwade & Ruddell, 2012; Ruddell & Wagener, 2015; Wagener et al, 2021). Enhancing students' ability to conceptualize, analyze and interpret complex hydrologic processes is an area of much research (Bourget, 2006; Habib et al, 2018; Marshall et al, 2013; Merwade & Ruddell, 2012; Ngambeki et al, 2012; Ruddell & Wagener, 2015; Wagener et al, 2007, 2012). Educators have recognized a need to augment traditional teacher‐centred lectures centred on fundamental physical laws with student‐centred, data‐driven learning activities that enable students to explore the hydrological system using authentic datasets and modelling tools (Merwade & Ruddell, 2012).…”