Join our hosts now for a Virtual Roundtable discussion on student assessment:
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Andrew Miller of the Buck Institute for Education |
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Linda Burch of CommonSenseMedia.org |
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Dennis Frezzo of Cisco Networking Academy |
Implementing a comprehensive assessment model that enriches student learning represents a challenging cultural shift for many education environments. Using technology and new approaches to student assessment can improve both teaching and learning–helping students prepare for workforce success and global citizenship–but adding new forms of summative and formative assessment into an already complex environment poses a number of questions:
- To what extent does technology improve methods of skill assessment?
- What types of assessments we can offer that result in a positive feedback
loop to enrich the learning experience?
8 Responses to Virtual Roundtable: Assessments and Their Impact on the Education Agenda
Given the changing landscape of education today what types of assessments we be offered that result in a positive feedback loop that will enrich the learning experience?
John Behrens and Kristen DiCerbo (my colleagues at Cisco) use the term “digital ocean” to describe the wealth of data that current device and network technologies allows us to gather from formative and summative assessment experiences. Given these technologies and the digital ocean, we are particularly interested in feedback to the learner while learning — be that in the form of a detailed log analysis about their most recent performance assessment, intelligent tutoring systems, or games-as-assessment. Such feedback can be grounded, for example, in the misconceptions gathered by statistics from other teachers’ and learners’ experiences, probabilistic models for inferring the learner’s current proficiency, or finite state models of progress in an educational game. I’d be happy to expand on our experiences with any of these, but I would summarize that we envision more finely-grained, timely, statistically and probabilistically grounded personalized feedback to the learner, contextualized, and in situ.
Technology is a tool, that needs to be clear from the get go. That being said, technology is reshaping the way education is “done.” From blended learning models to social, the tools to use to assess students are almost endless. First, we need think about different types of assessment that we can use as educators and then look to see what tools can help facilitate that.
An example: Perhaps I want to check and see if students are having a challenge with work they been doing in class. Perhaps I want them to reflect on their learning, and I want this learning to happen outside of the classroom time. I might employ a twitter backchannel chat, or the use of a social media tool to have students send in their quick response. Because the technology is there to do this, I can have it happen. Technology is allowing assessment to be more flexible in terms of time and place.
I am huge proponent of Project Based Learning and other pedagogical models that truly engage students in discourse they find relevant and engaging. Within these models the keyword in assessment is authenticity. If the assessment means something, it is going to the world, if someone else other that the teacher is providing feedback, if the assessment itself mimics a real world experience, then students are more likely to engage in it. In turn, when authentic audience members are involved in the assessment process, then the feedback loop can naturally become real and meaningful.
In the Cisco Networking Academy, we face the issue of authenticity daily as we deal with a portfolio of assessment options, ranging from hands-on skills-based (performance) assessment in person on real networking equipment, to evaluating performance by analyzing the configuration logs and final states of remotely accessed equipment, to programming and authoring simulation-based assessment experiences. We share your interest in Project Based Learning, do you have any favorite sources for assessment of PBL and the issue of authenticity? Those interested in some of the research we have done are invited to
https://research.netacad.net
thanks.
Part of the definition of PBL is that it demands Public audience. It is part of the design. If you got to bie.org, and then go to tools, there is a project design rubric that talks about the essential elements, one of these being public audience.
Learning requires feedback – it is the starting point for gaining a sense of what you know and if what you know has changed – that is, that you have learned. In the work I’ve been doing with colleagues on the issue of learning productivity the role of assessment systems, of all kinds, is absolutely central. Just recently, at the Education World Forum in London in early January 2012, we released preliminary versions of a new round of Promethean Thinking Deeper Research Papers on a “Leap in Learning Productivity”, including a new paper by Janet Looney and George Siemens on a key new concept: Assessment Competency as well as the nature and role of ‘learning analytics’. If anyone on this list is interested in this work just let me know (rielm (at) yahoo.com).
One of the main keys to successful assessments is having a clear idea of what knowledge, skills, and abilities you want to assess. Once that is clear, the following questions are: what behaviors would provide information about those things and how can we design tasks to elicit those behaviors. This last place is where technology comes in. It allows us to greatly expand the options in terms of tasks we can use or create to gather observations of students.
After presenting tasks, we need to be able to gather information from those tasks and accumulate it in a way that allows for meaningful feedback. Technology allows us to do this both through automated scoring and allowing for the creation of complex statistical models to accumulate the data.
Finally, technology allows us to provide feedback in a variety of ways. We can program our learning tools to monitor for particular activities and provide specific feedback when they occur. It also allows for visualizations that help students and instructors see patterns in assessment data to allow for more meaningful inferences.
So, in fact, technology comes into play in a variety of places in the assessment process.
Backwards Design, whether through a PBL Model, or Understanding By Design model demands that we know the skills we intend to assess and ensure that the assessment itself measures those skills. Great point by Kristen!
I also think that technology can provide ways to address multiple intelligences in terms of assessment. The plethora of tools allows for differentiated instruction and assessment!