Group items tagged

"Rubrics hold a mirror up to your objectives for an assessment task. Matt Townsley remembers well the day he looked into this mirror and didn't like what he saw. "I realized my criteria were mostly about how neat the project looked. It hit me that students could do well without knowing a whole lot about the learning objective."

This sounds like an interesting article that someone took the time out to put up here on Diigo. There's only one problem, this seems to be some sort of "pay to view" site. Visitors actually cannot see the article in question (well, they get a 2-paragraph preview). Diigo friends, please don't point to sites that don't give the full information.

Actually, one need not pay, but to read the whole article, one does have to sign in - the account is free, and I understand some don't want to sign in. Still, the article raises some good points.

Asa Spencer of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute writes in the Education Gadfly Weekly: "Traditionalists cringe, tech buffs rejoice: This latest NAEP writing assessment for grades eight and twelve marks the first computer-based appraisal (by the "nation's report card") of student proficiency in this subject. It evaluates students' writing skills (what NAEP calls both academic and workplace writing) based on three criteria: idea development, organization, and language facility and conventions. Results were predictably bad: Just twenty-four percent of eighth graders and 27 percent of twelfth graders scored proficient or above. Boys performed particularly poorly; half as many eighth-grade males reached proficiency as their female counterparts. The use of computers adds a level of complexity to these analyses: The software allows those being tested to use a thesaurus (which 29 percent of eighth graders exploited), text-to-speech software (71 percent of eighth graders used), spell check (three-quarters of twelfth graders), and kindred functions. It is unclear whether use of these crutches affected a student's "language facility" scores, though it sure seems likely. While this new mechanism for assessing kids' writing prowess makes it impossible to track trend data, one can make (disheartening) comparisons across subjects. About a third of eighth graders hit the NAEP proficiency benchmark in the latest science, math, and reading assessments, compared to a quarter for writing. So where to go from here? The report also notes that twelfth-grade students who write four to five pages a week score ten points higher than those who write just one page a week. Encouraging students to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) is a start."

"Formative feedback is instrumental in the learning experience of a student. It can be effective in promoting learning if it is timely, personal, manageable, motivational, and in direct relation with assessment criteria. Despite its importance, however, research suggests that students are discouraged from engaging in the feedback process primarily for reasons that relate to lack of motivation and difficulty in relating to and reflecting on the feedback comments. In this paper we present Online FEdback System (OFES), an e-learning tool that effectively supports the provision of formative feedback. Our aims are to enhance feedback reception and to strengthen the quality of feedback through the way feedback is communicated to the students. We propose that an effective feedback communication mechanism should be integrated into a student's online learning space and it is anticipated that this provision will motivate students to engage with feedback. Empirical evidence suggests that the developed system successfully addressed the issues of student engagement and motivation and achieved its objectives. The results of using the system for two years indicate a positive perception of the students which, in turn, encourage us to further explore its effectiveness by extending its functionality and integrating it into a an open source learning management system"

While the law requires teachers to use evidence-based practices in their classrooms, the field has not yet determined criteria for evidence based practice nor whether special education has a solid foundation of evidence-based practices. Also, those teaching strategies that have been researched are difficult for teachers to access.

A Generic Rubric for Evaluating ePortfolios The following rubric has been adapted by the ePortfolio Portal team as an example of the evaluation of eportfolios. The exact criteria will depend on the purpose of the evaluation.

The Blended and Online Assessment Taxonomy Infographic presents types of activities and grading and feedback criteria to help you plan better assessments.

Study of what young people, college age, used as criteria in assessing online sources.

The Louisiana Assistive Technology site has links to dozens of apps sorted by a variety of criteria.

"Periodically I find myself confused about my online presence and contributions. Am I using wikis, blogs, twitter, social networks, and email effectively? Effective by what criteria? Indeed, who am I trying to influence? My explorations of what others say about this recently has led me to a position-albeit a provisional one... The social, not the medium (or technology), should be the primary consideration. The criterion we need to apply in designing our online presence and contributions could be something like: "Am I welcoming and cultivating apprentices who are getting prepared to go on and cultivate the kinds of interaction in virtual and physical space that support their own work?" "

Criteria for potential digi.citizen course

Evaluating the Electronic PortfolioIn reviewing the electronic portfolios that are produced, it is important to establish different expectation levels for development. Below are a set of rubrics that address different criteria for effective electronic portfolio development, which are closely aligned with the technology skills of the student or teacher portfolio developer.

"Angry, threatening and highly critical parenting is more likely to result in children with defiant, noncompliant and revengeful behaviour that spills over to adulthood and impacts relationships with all authority figures. Now a study by researchers at UC San Francisco has confirmed this link and found that kindergarten may provide a unique opportunity for these harshly parented children to retool negative behaviour. The study is published in the journal Development and Psychopathology on Nov. 21, 2018. In the study, the researchers looked at 338 kindergartners in six public schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. They found that 10 percent of the children met the criteria for the oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Among this group, 71 percent had been exposed to high levels of harsh parenting, versus 29 percent who had been raised with lower levels of harsh parenting."

"It is a beacon many professionals aspire towards, and the notion of being labelled as 'outstanding', or not, by others can make or break schools, teachers, and students. There are times where the label 'outstanding' is made by subjective criteria, or judgements are made based on data sets. Either way, aspiring to be outstanding remains high on the agenda for many within education - but what, exactly, is outstanding?"

"While gamification is gaining ground in business, marketing, corporate management, health insurance,ecology and wellness initiatives, its application in education is still an emerging trend. This article presents a study of the published empirical research on the application of gamification to education.The study is limited to papers that discuss explicitly the effects of use of game elements in specificeducational contexts. It employs a systematic mapping design. Accordingly, a categorical structure forclassifying the research results is proposed based on the extracted topics discussed in the reviewed papers. The categories include gamification design principles, game mechanics, context of applyinggamification, consisting of type of application, educational level, and academic subject,implementation and evaluation. By mapping the published work to the classification criteria andanalyzing them, the study highlights the directions of the currently conducted empirical research onapplying gamification to education. It also indicates some major obstacles and needs, such as the needfor a proper technological support, the need for controlled studies demonstrating reliable positive ornegative results of using specific game elements in particular educational contexts, etc. Although mostof the reviewed papers report promising results, more substantial empirical research is needed todetermine whether both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation of the learners can be influenced bygamification"

Number Talks are a wonderful way to see where our students are with their mathematical thinking. As a part of a daily routine, a Number Talk promotes number sense and mathematical reasoning. In this post, I revisit what a Number Talk can reveal about our students' understanding of mathematics, and how they might be used to promote a fresh perspective. In addition, I examine a success criteria for Number Talks that is more expansive and recognises their true power.