Climbing the STAIRs: Assessing students’ social scientific reasoning skills

Highlights:
- Assessing complex skills in secondary school teaching practice is considered challenging
- We developed items (STAIRs) to formatively assess students’ social scientific reasoning
- STAIRs were validated by experts, teachers, think-aloud interviews, and test administration
- STAIRs elicited students’ reasoning about social problems in three proficiency levels
- The design principles may be applied by teachers in the development of assessment items
Purpose:Assessing complex skills is considered important but challenging. This study focused on developing assessment items to evaluate secondary social science students’proficiency in the sub-skill of causal analysis.Design/methodology/approach:Based on a conceptual framework of social scientific reasoning, we designed formative assessment items known as STAIRs (Social science Teaching Assessment Items of Reasoning). The STAIRs were validated in three focus groups: two groups of assessment experts (N= 7 and N= 3) and one group of social science teachers (N= 10). Additionally, think-aloud interviews were conducted with eight social science students. The quality of the STAIRs was evalu-ated by administering the items to 338 social science students in 21 Dutch social science classes.Findings:The results showed that it is possible to distinguish between the three performance levels in students’reasoning using the STAIRs.Practical implications:The design principles for the STAIRs may aid teachers in developing addi-tional assessment items.