Week 7 - Are my Students Learning?

At the end of the class every teacher has this question at the back of their mind. The content is delivered, I have had flawless delivery, my information is current and evidence based but why are the students showing no sign of comprehension? If you have done all you can is it then the students problem if he/she has not understood or not performed well in exams? Well I used to think like this but recently I have reevaluated my stance on assessments. This week was particularly enlightening as I learnt about authentic tasks and how assessments need to designed to engage students and become the main driver of learning.

Key Points

Its very important to use Authentic Tasks to evaluate students learning. In traditional assessment the course content is the main driver for creating assessments. This means that the content is developed first (what is to be delivered to the student) and then from this the assessments are developed to assess if the content has been understood by the students.

In authentic task assessment its the other way around. The teacher first articulates what competencies the student should have or what tasks the students should be able to perform. Once this is done, the content is developed which then enables the student to perform these tasks. 

Resources

 

This is a link to a very interesting special report titled - Assessing Online Learning: Strategies, Challenges and Opportunities which combines 12 articles from Online Classroom.
http://www.unh.edu/eunh/sites/unh.edu.eunh/files/docs/AssessingOnlineLearningReport.pdf

A very good article highlighting some good practices to assess large classes.
http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/assessinglearning/03/large.html

A good website which reviews authentic tasks, building rubrics and building standards for measuring and improving students learning.
http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/index.htm

This website offers a wide range of classroom assessment techniques and program specific tools for evaluating student learning, attitudes and performance.
 http://www.flaguide.org/

This website includes examples of high quality online assessments and activities relevant to higher education.
 http://www.learningdesigns.uow.edu.au/exemplars/title.html

 

Reflection

Online assessments have their own challenges, some which are very similar to the challenges encountered when teaching face to face. The online assessment challenges arise because of many reasons. First its the actual distance between the teacher and the learner, then there are technological challenges and then there is the issue of time management and increased workload.

I was able to identify some of the areas that I need to work on to make my work easier in the long run. For instance I need to make sure that there is a balance of qualitative and quantitative assessments in my course. Its definitely easier to mark quantitative assessments but these cannot elicit higher order learning outcomes from the students. At the end of their degree the students need to be prepared for real life problems, real life on the job performance and a good education should be able to prepare them for real life circumstances. Life hardly ever throws a multiple choice question your way!! So in context its absolutely important that the assessments are authentic and give the students hands on practice of what it will be like in when they join the workforce.

One of the main things I have thought about this week is taking away the high level of subjectivity from my assessments. I want to make sure that all my assessment have a clearly defined and easy to understand rubrics so that I can be objective while marking students work. At the same time I want to demystify assessments for my students by giving them the rubrics beforehand so they are aware of what is expected from them. As part of this, I have also thought of various ways i can improve on my skills of giving my students good feedback. This week has challenged my thoughts on how I should be assessing my students.