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Swan - assessment matters
- 2. assessment of online discussion (Swan, Schenker, Swan, Arnold & Kuo, 2007) ~criteria criteria initial posts/stud 0.83 0.82 initial post length 147.19 145.40 responses/stud** 1.52 1.96 response length* 68.73 70.12 messages read** 11.83 23.05 *significant at p>.05; **significant at p>.01
- 3. Assess what is most important.
- 4. worth being familiar with important to know & do enduring understandings Understanding By Design, Wiggins & McTighe
- 9. discussion postings rubrics (Pelz, 2004)
- 10. Assess often.
- 11. Use a variety of assessments.
- 14. Assessments can be powerful opportunities for learning, not just opportunities to demonstrate what has been learned.
- 19. ARTICLE REVIEW Please use this form to guide your discussion of each research article as well as a template for your group submission. You should address each category in your discussions (remember I can see these) and your group leader should use the assignment link to submit a completed version of this form (you may delete the questions, but be sure to answer them) for you all to receive credit for the assignment. Article (use APA reference style): Research Problem: What is the general problem addressed by this article (stated or unstated)? Literature Review: What major findings are noted in the literature review? Is the literature review related both to the problem and to the reported study? Research Questions: What are the research questions? Are the research questions stated? Are they meaningful? Does the study really address the questions? Research Methodology: What is the research methodology? Does the research methodology suit the research questions? Can it answer them? Are there some other method(s) that might be more appropriate? Results: What are the major findings of the study? Are they justified by the data? Conclusions: What are the author(s) conclusions? Are they justified by the findings? Are they significant?
Editor's Notes
- I have one or two big ideas about assessment and some practical approaches that follow. The first big idea is that assessment matters. Grades are the currency of the classroom – what you choose to assess is what students will value. Thus you can and should use assessment to guide their behaviors.
- So what follows from realizing that assessment matters is that it is really important to assess what you think it is most important for students to learn.
- So for example, this is a matrix I have created for my Ed Research course – we have 4 departmental goals for this course. The first, which you can’t see here, is that students gain a general understanding of quantitative and qualitative methods. From each goal, I have derived specific objectives and developed assessments for each. I share this matrix with my students
- I share the matrix with my students because it seems to me the best way to get students to learn what you want is to tell them. Thus in general I think it is important to make your assessment processes transparent to your students. This is probably more important online than on-ground . We use a book in the Ed Research class, and we have collectively developed study guides for it that alert students to what parts of the chapters they really need to know and what parts they just need to know about.
- Wiggins and McTighe also point out that because enduring understandings are complex, assessments of enduring understandings must also be complex. A good way to be transparent about complex assignments is to use a rubric – to identify the critical features of the assignment and explicitly define levels of meeting those criteria.
- This is a rubric for a research paper. This is one shows how I use it for grading. I also put copious edits and comments in students’ papers, but this document highlights the most important things they need to do.
- In an online course, assessments are one of the most important points of interaction between you and your students. It is therefore important to access students frequently. I don’t think that if you just give a midterm and a final, or a midterm and a project and a final, or even a midterm, a project, a final and discussions, you can expect to use assessment to guide learning.
- I also think it is clearly the case that people make meaning in a variety of ways. Thus it stands to reason that they are better or worse at demonstrating understanding in a variety of ways, and so that if you really want to know what your students know, you should assess them in a variety of ways.
- For example, this is a piece of the calendar for my Ed Tech foundations course. Notice that there are on average four different assignments per module and that they all involve different sorts of skills.
- This is my other technology course which focuses on emerging technologies. Discussion and journaling are in all my classes, but here students also have an ongoing blog, and they contribute to a class wiki.
- Perhaps you have heard the phrase “embedded assessment”. The notion of embedded assessments is that assessments should not just be one time things that assess what students have learned, but activities that guide learning. This of course follows from the notion that assessments matter, but it suggests that powerful learning can take place through assessments.
- For example, I let students have do-overs for just about everything but discussions and journals which are of course time sensitive. I let students take quizzes 3 times and I average the scores. They can keep redoing written assignments until they get them right and I give lots of feedback to point them in that direction.
- I also use structured assessment to “scaffold” – student learning and development of skills. Scaffolding is another bit of education jargon but the idea is that you can provide a framework, much like architectural scaffolding, that will help students learn how to do something while they are doing it -- develop a research paper for example.
- I break the development of a research proposal into 5 smaller pieces (shown here on the right in blue) – creating a problem statement, finding sources in the literature, writing a literature review, writing research questions, and developing a research methodology
- Each of these parts are completed as separate assignments, graded on a rubric, and students can redo them until they get them right, so that by the time they need to submit their complete proposal, they know how to do it.
- Another thing I do in the Ed Research class is have students critique journal articles in groups. This assignment also is graded on a rubric, but because critiquing research articles is usually something they have never done, I give them an outline with sets questions to answer to scaffold their reviews.
- And because they aren’t typically great a working in groups, I also help them create a structure for group work by requiring each group to develop and turn in a schedule showing who will lead the discussion of each article and what exactly the group expects of its leaders and participants.