Learner Assessment

Assessment plays a key role in ensuring the success, longevity, and evolution of the Carpentries workshops. The primary goal of our assessment efforts is to evaluate the impact we are having teaching data skills throughout our global community. Our assessment efforts are meant to guide the development, implementation, and instruction of our workshops. We are committed to providing directed feedback to our community regarding our assessment targets and using information collected from assessment to improve how we teach data skills and build learning communities.

Our assessment tools will cover content knowledge, self-efficacy, and metacognitive strategies. Additionally, evaluation will occur at the end of each workshop and 6 months after a workshop with data releases published bi-annually, and an annual review of our impact will be published on our website. Source code, data, and additional information are also available in this GitHub repository.

We are committed to supporting our learners, accommodating their differences, and encouraging them to grow individually and become part of our community of practice. We also encourage them to understand, reflect upon, and monitor their own learning.

We assess our learners by measuring changes in their attitudes, motivation, and self-efficacy. Our pre-workshop survey includes questions about learners’ attitudes about the content covered in their workshop, and their objectives (i.e. what they hope to learn).

We also ask questions to measure learners’ mindset (growth vs. fixed). Our objective is to measure their confidence in their ability to learn, not necessarily execute specific tasks.

Additionally, we measure learners’ perception of skill growth and whether or not they plan to recommend our workshops to colleagues.

Our pre- and post-workshop surveys can be previewed here:

Programmatic Assessment

In May 2018, we began regularly publishing programmatic assesssment reports. These reports provide overviews of our workshop and instructor activities. More information including published reports can be found on our website.