Group items tagged

"When I think about my own definition of a "meaningful assessment," I think the test must meet certain requirements. The assessment must have value other than "because it's on the test." It must intend to impact the world beyond the student "self," whether it is on the school site, in the outlying community, the state, country, world, etc. Additionally, the assessment should incorporate skills that students need for their future. That is, the test must assess skills other than merely content. It must also test how eloquently the students communicate their content."

" SOLUTIONS FOR EDUCATION AND LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (LMS) The Biomids Biometric solutions address needs in online education and other forms of corporate training and professional development, often facilitated through Learning Management Systems (LMS). They confirm the identity of participants (Authentication) and deter and detect cheating on remotely administered tests and assessments (Proctoring) through the use of advanced biometric technologies. The Biomids Authenticator and Proctor - Is a fully automated Authentication and Proctoring system, available in both web-based and download versions, that provides highly effective, convenient and cost-effective means of ensuring testing validity. Authenticates participants at the beginning and throughout the test/assessment (Persistent Authentication). Validates test results confirming that the participant has completed the assessment without unauthorized assistance through the use of video capture and website monitoring (Proctoring). Try a free 30-day trial download demo: The following video explains how the Biomids Authenticator and Proctor works in the case of test proctoring in online education. The Biomids Authenticator and Proctor is one of the most effective, convenient and economical proctoring systems available in the market today: * Low fixed cost - Allows frequent use for both Authentication and Proctoring. * Assured authentication - Utilizes powerful advanced facial recognition technology. * High integrity - Persistent Authentication throughout the test/assessment period. * Convenience - No need to schedule a human proctor - test taking anytime, anywhere. * Dashboard - Concise results uploaded to instructor or designated staff."

"I created the document below as a menu of choices between iPad apps and Web 2.0 applications that can be used to employ types of formative assessments. It is organized to encourage a balanced approach to formative assessment so that teachers can easily see the various options they might have to encourage Write, Do, and Say in the classroom."

"the key reasons include: 1. branding and affiliation with elite institutions and professors, 2. well established courses with rich support on resources and assessment (grading/peer assessment), 3. granting of certificates of achievement or statements of attainment (in recognition), 4. degrees of difficulties - xMOOCs are much easier compared to cMOOCs, 5. perceptions of learners - xMOOCs are based on 1,2,3 above, and 4 - learners - cMOOCs would have to curate resources and create blog posts/join forums, 6. pedagogy, 7. assessment."

"The relatively low completion rates of learners have been a central critique as MOOCs grow in popularity. This focus on completion rates, however, implies a monolithic view of disengagement that fails to acknowledge alternative forms of participation in MOOCs. Identifying subpopulations of learners based on their longitudinal engagement with the course allows MOOC designers to target interventions and develop adaptive course features. We develop a simple, scalable, and informative classification method that identifies four prototypical engagement trajectories: Completing learners, who complete the majority of the assessments offered in the class; Auditing learners, who do assessments infrequently (if at all) and engage instead by watching video lectures; Disengaging learners, who do assessments at the beginning of the course but then have a marked decrease in engagement, generally in the first third of the class; and Sampling learners, who enter and exit the course quickly, watching a minimal number of videos at some point during the course."

"With the 2014 JIF ranking finally expected this week, the anti-JIF coalition of scientists, journal editors, and scholarly publishers who issued the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) are greeting the delayed JIFs with examples of JIF-less "good practices" for scientific assessment. DORA is calling for the scientific community to contribute fresh JIF-less examples to a new DORA web page. "

The education division of the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) has released the first report in a new series of Behind the Data publications. According to Testing and Assessment: A PreK-12 U.S. Education Technology Market Report, testing and assessment products - which include software, digital content and related digital services - now make up the largest single category of educational technology sales.

"Prior Learning Assessment, or PLA, is a little-discussed strategy to facilitate time-to-degree, particularly for non-traditional students. The concept is to set up the structure and processes to evaluate corporate training from employment, military training, civic responsibilities, travel, and independent study and award academic credit from these out-of-the-classroom learning situations. As the higher education population diversifies with much higher percentages of working adults, PLA can be an important factor in reducing total cost and time-to-degree."

""Work backwards. Write the performance goals, decide how you will assess those, and then design the program. The content and activities you create should support eventual achievement of those goals.""

"This chart shows us the step by step approach to locate, to use, to assess and to evaluate the information. This chart helps us to keep the certain targets in our mind while looking and using the information. For example, we should be very specific for the kind of information, we require in our search."

"Competency-based learning turns higher education on its head - starting not with the curriculum, but rather the competencies one should exhibit upon completion (according to, say, employers). From there, course developers design assessments that test for these competencies. Then - and only then - do we turn to the task of developing the curricula that prepares students to demonstrate mastery on the assessments. In a competency-based program, failure becomes an anachronism; students continue until they demonstrate competency."

"Cognii VLA is a type of an intelligent tutoring system that engages learners in a real time, one to one coaching conversation, helping them revise their answers. Unlike other tutoring systems, Cognii VLA uses learners' own natural language, not their selections in multiple choice items, as the basis for assessment. Because open response questions are more accurate than multiple choice questions in assessing deep understanding and critical thinking, Cognii VLA can provide better coaching than earlier systems. "

An assessment model for undergraduates

"What makes so many of those atrocious singers laughable to us-excepting the ones who put on deliberately bad performances in order to get on camera-turns out to be a problem that plagues many undergraduates, especially the weakest among them: an inability to judge accurately their own level of skill or knowledge in a specific area. Poor metacognition means that some terrible yet hopeful singers on American Idol are unable to assess their own weak vocal talents. And it means that some students have a mistaken sense of confidence in the depth of their learning."

"Six weeks into Coursera's Passion Driven Statistics course from Wesleyan University, students received a notice that they would participate in a new kind of peer-based grading exercise for their final projects. While nothing has been said publicly about the experiment until now, this marks a radical departure from the usual quiz-based examinations provided by MOOCs."

"Chief Education Officer" Steve Silvius reached out to introduce EmergingEdTech readers to Three Ring, a free application that allows teachers to quickly and easily create digital portfolios of student work, using a wide variety of devices for input.

"Google has funded an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Education to develop a "Big Open Online Course," or BOOC. Daniel Hickey will offer a free course in September focused on educators and titled "Assessment Practices, Principles and Policies" for as many as 500 students, funded by a $50,000 Google grant."

Free Webinar Raise Student Achievement via Formative Assessment 10/17/12 at 2pm ET

"Suppose instead students were rewarded for cooperation. Not collaboration; this is just the school-level emulation of the creation of cliques and corporations. Cooperation, which is a common and ad hoc creation of interactions and exchanges for mutual value.  Cooperative behaviours include exchanges of goods and services, agreement on open standards and protocols, sharing of resources in common (and open) pools, and similar behaviours. "

"Google Forms makes peer evaluation possible and simple. I collect the names and email addresses of both students: evaluator and evaluatee. I use the "grid" style question type to allow peers to rank each criteria on a scale of 1-5 against the rubric. I can include a URL to the grading criteria in the help text, so all students have access to the standard assessment guide. "