The effect of alternative measurement and evaluation techniques on middle school seventh-grade students' attitudes, motivation, and achievement towards science course

In addition to traditional measurement and evaluation techniques, alternative measurement and evaluation techniques that consider individual differences and measure students' high-level cognitive behaviors during a learning process should be included in teaching, as emphasized by the science course teaching programs. This study aimed to determine the effect of using alternative measurement and evaluation techniques in the Cell and Divisions, Force and Energy, Pure Substance and Mixtures units of the seventh-grade science course on students' attitudes, motivation, and achievement towards science course. The study was carried out with seventh-grade students from a public school in Van, Turkey during the 2019–2020 academic year. The researcher of the study performed the study's implementation stage which lasted 14 weeks. The study used the quasi-experimental design and experimental design with the pretest-posttest control group. One of the seventh-grade classes was assigned as the control group and one as the experimental group by drawing. A total of 72 students, 35 in the control group and 37 in the experimental group, comprised the study sample. The science lessons were taught in a student-centered way in line with the science education teaching program in the control and experimental groups. In the learning-teaching process, traditional measurement and evaluation tools were used in the control group and, comparatively, alternative measurement and evaluation tools in the experimental group. The followings are some examples of the alternative measurement and evaluation techniques that were applied for teaching the experimental group: Structured Grid, Abstract, Peer and Group Evaluation, Diagnostic Tree, Rubric, Word Association Test, Poster, Concept Map, Semantic Analysis Table, Concept Cartoon, Concept Tree, Portfolio, Project, and Performance Task. Attitude towards Science Course Scale, Motivation for Learning Science Scale, and Science Achievement Test were used to collect data as pretest before the implementation and posttest after the implementation. Independent samples t-test and paired samples t-test were used for the data analysis. The study results revealed a significant increase in the experimental group students' attitudes, motivation, and achievement towards science course. No significant increase was found in the control group students' attitudes and motivation level at the end of the study. However, the increase in the achievement level of these students was significant. Furthermore, the attitude, motivation, and achievement level of the experimental group for which the alternative measurement and evaluation techniques were applied were found to be significantly higher than those of the control group in which the traditional measurement and evaluation techniques were used. By looking at the positive and significant effect of alternative measurement and evaluation techniques on attitudes, motivation, and achievement levels, it can be recommended that alternative measurement and evaluation techniques be included in the measurement and evaluation process of teaching.