Group items tagged

I won't say that this makes shifting conceptions of assessment in one's own courses less daunting, but I appreciate that it acknowledges the significant demand that changing assessment criteria can put on teachers. I have to admit that lot of the time, when I read about new assessment techniques, they sound interesting but exhausting to implement. We've seen a lot of stage-based models for education/assessment/collaboration/etc., but this one is especially clear and I like the thoroughness of the horror story example.

Dan I greatly appreciate your view point on this and can share another horror story with you that actually turned out to be a fairy-tale situation in the end! I'll make a note to discuss in tomorrow's live session. Cheers!

The more that I read about student centered learning and assessment, the more I realize that this is the direction I have been (slowly, glacially) moving in for years. Thanks for this!

This website shows the work of a group of educators of theatre who, through years of experience, have come up with more than 15 assessment models that can be used in the professional theatre education. Models are templates or transportable models. I found particularly helpful that they compare "traditional" assessment of teaching King Lear ("a multiple-choice test on the play at the end of the ten weeks") with "performance" assessment of KL (including " informal check-ins, observations, academic prompts, mini-quizzes and something called a performance task at the end of the course"). Student anxiety rises with the amount of overseeing and work, but "clear exercises with rubrics" help. Bottom line: smaller, more clearly focused assessment rounds help student prepare better for the final performance. Hmm... Website has assessment models and results, case analysis, reports for audiences, and lots of ideas. Some a bit calculated, but good food for thought. Comment from the website: "The result of using TEAM's Assessment Models is a more accurate picture of student learning. For example, a more accurate picture of student learning might include a student who does not just know Shakespeare, but knows how King Lear ends and has an opinion about an alternative ending for that play based on what he or she learned in class."

This was linked to from the Authentic Assessment website and looks like a treasure trove of useful assessment tools and rubrics for InfoLit. Page was last updated in March of this year too, so it's not likely to be full of broken links.

This short blog by an anthropology professor resonated very much with my own state of mind out this. The importance of doing assessment right, alongside the numbing effects of assessment as a hugely time consuming new set of bureaucratic requirements. In the end, the author provides some really helpful reminders about how this works in practice. It helped me to realize that assessment itself is a topic we need to continually assess, for our own educational goals.

This resource gives some great, easy to read ideas for matching your learning objectives with your assessment techniques. It also has a list of criteria for writing clear assignments, which could be useful as a checklist when creating a new assignment.

Hi Susan - I particularly liked the Alignment tab, which gave some very clear suggestions of assignments that align with stated learning objectives. Your suggestion of a checklist is brilliant! I also noticed that they linked to their Institutional Assessment page from this page - a nice reminder that everything needs to be in alignment at every level.

Susan, Great find, I too find the tabs really helpful and have bookmarked this reference to my Bookmarks page so that I can refer to it over and over. Thanks so much!

The theoretical difference between formative and summative assessment strategies is explored in this paper as well as the fact that on-line assessment is a new field of study with very little written about it.

Here are some insights into how Georgia Tech's Writing and Communication Program theorizes and practices assessment. They are certainly using some "trendy" approaches to assessment and evaluation; students have to compose a self-review essay, for example. Summary from the Website: The Writing and Communication Program is interested in formative and summative assessment in individual classes and in the program as a whole. To create consistent assessment across the entire program, we use a common base rubric (which individual instructors modify to fit their assignments) and an end-of-semester portfolio system.

My department spent a lot of time this year thinking about assessment in a process driven by accreditation. We came up with some fairly broad learning outcomes and not much in the way of detailed assessment. So I am very impressed by this webpage from the Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology in Ohio. Their departmental webpage includes very detailed assessment information that may be useful for everyone to keep in mind, but probably does not do much to attract students. In our own discussions we sometimes ran into confusion between providing information for current students about what we would be assessing and departmental advertizing-- two very different things.

Over the last decade, larger student numbers, reduced resources and increasing use of new technologies have led to the increased use of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) as a method of assessment in higher education courses. This paper identifies some limitations associated with MCQs from a pedagogical standpoint....

Trying to catch up and get ahead as I leave town this week :) I teach beginning undergraduates in typically large (150+ students) classes, often with little or no (or ineffective) TA assistance. Multiple choice questions are an absolute necessity as a management tool. I find that many of my colleagues in traditional liberal arts colleges think that multiple choice questions are unacceptable as a means of student assessment. However, I've noticed that many of the online adaptive learning tools and licensing exams required by many professional programs (nursing among them...) are also based primarily on multiple choice questions. I looked for an article to rebut the reading from the flaguide website (http://www.flaguide.org/) which stated, "...the multiple choice test..... [is] usually most effective at measuring fact-based knowledge and the ability to perform algorithmic problem-solving...However, if our goals include different student outcomes than these....then this assessment technique will not provide useful feedback about attainment of these goals." The above article gives several ideas for creating and using multiple choice questions to assess higher order thinking, my favorite being the idea of assigning scores based not only on student answers to the questions but also their confidence in their answer. I also liked the idea of the self-tests that students can take repeatedly to check their mastery of concepts, which seems to play into the instructional design loops that we were studying in M3.

I think it is an interesting article about assessment. Some points are the same as what Leah mentioned.

Assessments should reveal how well students have learned what we want them to learn while instruction ensures that they learn it. For this to occur, assessments, learning objectives, and instructional strategies need to be closely aligned so that they reinforce one another.

This is a special report that features 12 articles from "Online Classroom" that offers some insight into how to assess online learning at the course, program, and institutional levels.

A series of 15 slides that concisely delineate assessment strategies for online courses.

This article delves deeper into the third part of the COI (cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence) and discusses how this area can be assessed for online learning.

Although the target readership is grade 6-12 instructors, I find the methodology in this article applicable to what we are trying to do. Give it a read and see what you think.

This page is actually a brief (but helpful and concise) overview of the use of rubrics. The main reason I am posting it here is because the entire site (Cornell University Center for Teaching Excellence) has a wealth of information on design, assessment, student engagement and using technology in the classroom.

Lot's of interesting charts and worksheets on creating assessment tools. Worth taking a look.

Written in 2006, the author shares his tips and tricks for reducing instructor workload after teaching both online and hybrid courses. Two useful tips the author shared are: 1) to create a reference list and share links to references as applicable in each learning module, and 2) to setup appropriate assessments when developing course assignments (such as mixing instructor, peer, and self-assessments) to help instructor manage workload assessment per student.

This article addresses practical concerns about online discussions. It stresses the importance of having good discussion questions that are clearly linked to the learning objectives. There are also some good assessment tips.

I like the title, but I couldn't access it -- sign in required??

Yes, Peggy, the article comes from one of the main databases through the Emory Library.