This document discusses various methods for assessing student learning and academic integrity in distance education. It describes assessing student achievement, distinguishing between plagiarism and carelessness, using proctored exams to balance anonymity, evidence-centered assessment design, automated essay scoring, academic misconduct policies, and using portfolios and rubrics to evaluate asynchronous discussion contributions.

1. Assessment for Distance
Education
Haley Yasses
APT 502
Assignment 4
Module 10

2. Assessing Learning Gains
• Just as exemplary “distance teaching” closely resembles our best models of
face-to-face teaching, assessing student achievement has a core of good
practice that remains constant across a multitude of teaching–learning
configurations

3. Plagiarism
• Instructors should attempt to distinguish between plagiarism and the simple
misuse of sources, resulting from ignorance or carelessness.
• Other suggestions offered by the WPA include improving the design and
sequence of assignments, expecting students to incorporate the use of non-
text sources and considering how best to enforce disciplinary action.

4. Cheating
• Proctored exams provide a checkpoint to balance the perceived anonymity
of learning at a distance, ensuring that the student upon whose transcript the
course credit and grade will reside, or whose license validates his or her
abilities, is actually the student doing the work.

5. Evidence-Centered Design
• A promising area of research and development that begins with what’s
already known about cognitive processing is evidence-centered assessment
design.

6. Automated Essay Scoring
• Automated scoring of essays or other written work shows significant
potential for reducing the workload of teachers who have long bemoaned
the labor-intensity of reading successive drafts of papers.

7. Academic Misconduct
• Most institutions have policies stat-ng what constitutes academic
misconduct—misrepresentation, plagiarism, disruption of classes, and so
forth—and how infractions will be handled.
• Unfortunately, such policies seem to have little effect as deterrents to
unethical behavior.

8. Portfolios
• Portfolios have a long history of use as summative assessment tools in fields
such as graphic design, architecture, and marketing, but are gaining
acceptance quickly for their value as formative compilations of work in a
much broader range of disciplines.

9. Example rubric for asynchronous discussion
contributions