Summary of the Consensus reached in the discussions of the IANAS/IAP Workshop on Evaluation of IBSE Projects

Rio de Janeiro, May 2-3, 2006

•  Evaluation is an important component of the IBSE projects and should be included in the planning of these projects

•  In the initial stages, evaluation should be mostly of the formative kind and should be simple and inexpensive

•  Some of the procedures that can be used are the visit of the classrooms and observation of the on going activities in order to help to improve the effectiveness of the teachers

•  It is recommended that the IBSE projects use existing national or state tests for IBSE student assessment. Also it is recommended to interact with the entities responsible for generating those tests to include questions that measure aspects of critical thinking and problem solving that are important objectives of IBSE programs

•  It is recommended that evaluation of inquiry programs should included important aspects such as the impact of IBSE on the learning of language and mathematics, the impact on attitudes and capacities to improve good citizenship, and also the sustainability of the program attained through institution (e.g.: schools, university, etc) capacity building.

•  Inquiry curriculum should included embedded (built in) questions that can monitor closely the effectiveness of curriculum implementation. Also curriculum, at the appropriate level should include inquiry concepts (control experiments, reproducibility, accuracy, etc ) as content of science.

•  IBSE Programs should promote educational research that can help provide solid evidence on evaluation criteria and indicators.

•  International evaluation of programs should not result in ranking of countries and should not provide individual results of students or teachers.

May 4 th 2006

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