The Learning About STEM Student Outcomes (LASSO) Platform for assessment and research

How effective is my teaching? For over thirty years, instructors have used concept inventories and attitudes surveys to help answer this question. Unfortunately, no large-scale datasets have existed to inform their answers. Instead, instructors have relied upon rough rules of thumb and intuition. LASSO is an online platform designed to help instructors answer this question. The platform administers, aggregates, and scores pre/post, research-based assessments for instructors. Instructors receive a report on their students’ outcomes and can download all the data from their students. The platform also anonymizes the data and makes it available to researchers. To support educators and researchers in assessing instruction, the LASSO development team is working on integrating normative, national-level data into the assessment reports. We will present an analysis of concept inventory and attitudes surveys from over 300 introductory physics courses. Our discussion will cover how we intend to integrate these results into the LASSO platform to help researchers and instructors in assessing student outcomes.