At the ELIXIR all hands meeting in Rome last week, community member and Instructor Trainer Allegra Via organized a workshop led by Prof. Rochelle Tractenberg on the topic of Statistics and Metacognition. Prof. Tractenberg is a biostatistician and has developed a method for developing Mastery Rubrics (MR) to map out and support skills training in a variety of disciplines. In the workshop in Rome, we went through the Mastery Rubric for statistical literacy (MR-SL) to think about how training and mentoring engagements with researchers might fill out the skills rubric and support learning and skill development. These ideas are laid out in Prof. Tractenberg’s recent paper, “How the Mastery Rubric for Statistical Literacy Can Generate Actionable Evidence about Statistical and Quantitative Learning Outcomes”. Essentially Table 2 of that paper lays out the outcome of the process. The table is arranged as “performance level” vs. “Knowledge Skills and Abilities” (KSAs) in order to build a matrix of skills and what is required to demonstrate mastery.
This method may be of interest to Software Carpentry community members for two reasons. First, as a great way to organize efforts to enhance statistical literacy among your own community. Second, as a model for how to build a rubric for skills development and learning for any topic. I’m particularly interested in the second, trying to build a Mastery Rubric for research computation skills. This may require some outside funding to do well, and I’m going to begin building a proposal for such an effort. I hope that such a rubric can be used as a roadmap for lesson development, mentoring and support that can help develop computational skills for researchers. I think this will be an important overarching guide that serves to organize various workshops and skills development our community provides around the world. We currently serve a novice learner pretty well with our lessons, but have had a hard time articulating the intermediate and advanced skills a learner might focus on to advance their own abilities. I think the Mastery Rubric could help us to organize skills development and associated interventions (workshops, mentorship etc) that can help accelerate people as they seek to develop their own skills and abilities. If you’re interested in helping in this effort, or have some ideas about how this might dovetail into your own work and challenges, please reach out to me directly. Regards, --- Jonah Duckles Software Carpentry, Executive Director http://software-carpentry.org
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