Category: Student Assessment

Assessment Philosophy – Veronica Brown, CTE

Bishop's University building with trees and grey sky
Bishop’s University (photo by Ryan Millar, flickr)

A few weeks ago, Julie (Timmermans from CTE) and I visited Bishop’s University to facilitate two workshops. The morning session was on course design, a condensed version of CTE’s Course Design Fundamentals. In the afternoon, the session was titled, “Designing Assessment for Learning”. We had an absolutely wonderful time and met many faculty members from both Bishop’s University and Champlain College, which is also located in Lennoxville.

We struggled for quite some time with the content of the assessment workshop. Whole university courses are dedicated to this topic. We had just three hours. What should we cover? What were the most critical messages? Should we focus on specific tools? What are some of the “best practices” that are happening at Waterloo that we should share? Should we spend an equal amount of time on both formative and summative assessment? Wow! There is so much to cover.

OK. Perhaps we could focus the assessment plan (as our intention was that the take-away from the workshop would be to have an assessment plan) around a few specific assessment tools. But what should we include? Exams? Quizzes? Assignments? Written assignments? Problem sets? Labs? Projects? Research? Essays? Community Service? Design Competitions? Case Studies? Reports? Studio projects? Individual work? Team work? Participation? Reflective Writing? Again, what a lot of content to cover in just three hours!

Our initial thoughts and design focused heavily on content and all the knowledge we wanted to impart. Ironic given the fact that we had just planned a course design workshop. We eventually took our own advice and stepped away from the content. As we continued to wrestle with these ideas, we kept asking ourselves, if there is just one thing we would like participants to know or have when they walked out the door, what would it be? It took a really, really long time to figure this out.

Eventually, we realized that we wanted participants to explore a different element of assessment. While we could impart lots of ideas related to specific tools, we decided to focus instead on how we view and value assessment. We began the workshop with an exploration of the concerns we, as instructors, have about assessment then compared it with our perceptions of students’ concerns about assessment. We then explored elements of a framework for assessment, which includes: observation (obtaining evidence of learning); interpretation (reasoning from the evidence); learning outcomes; and, at the centre of the framework, the purpose (Why am I assessing?) (the framework we presented was adapted from the National Research Council (2001). Knowing What Students Know. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, p. 44.).

Both these pieces led to the final activity of the day, in which we asked participants to articulate their Assessment Philosophy Plan, which might eventually become part of their Teaching Philosophy. The idea was to explore what their goals and philosophy were for the assessment of their students. We asked them to reflect on the following questions.

  • Who is involved with the assessment?
  • What roles does assessment play in learning?
  • What boundaries surround your assessment framework?
  • How can you provide flexibility to support the variety of learners in your class?
  • What pieces are rigid and which ones are flexible?

Having written this philosophy statement, we then asked them to reflect on how the assessments in their course reflect this philosophy. In reality, we cannot always control the contextual factors that impact our assessment choice (e.g., if part of our philosophy relates to developing a reflective practice, how do we provide formative feedback to a class of 1500?). But by reflecting and articulating our own philosophy, it can help guide us when we need to make some of the more difficult decisions tied to our assessment strategy for our course.

 

Creative and Flexible – Marlene Griffith Wrubel

In the past two months, a number of workshops were offered on current trends in teaching and learning, including How to Develop Activities that Incorporate the Concept of a Deep Approach to Learning, Personal Autonomy in Learning, Flipping the Classroom, and the Meaning of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) in Education.

Recurring themes of collaboration and feedback, instructor creativity and flexibility, and injecting elements of fun in courses were addressed. Most importantly, faculty from different disciplines had an opportunity to interact with each other about the learning environments they have developed to support their students.

I was fortunate to take part in some of those conversations. It is clear to me that the successful instructors (instructors happy with how students learn in their course) are those who are creative and flexible in their approach to teaching. These instructors have systematically reworked learning activities to meet their learning outcomes. Their students learn through trial and error, receive feedback from their peers and the instructor, and are given an opportunity to improve in subsequent course activities. The learning activity is structured to emphasize the learning process and encourage students to think about the course material rather than focus on their grade. The instructor may not always be centre-stage or initiate the next step in the life of the assignment but guides the learning process nonetheless. These instructors also recognize that soliciting informal and formal student feedback of their learning experience is an important element of maintaining a good learning environment.

The trends in teaching and learning mentioned at the start of this blog will be present for the foreseeable future. Adoption of some of these trends to the classroom and online environment will take creativity and flexibility on the part of instructors. In some cases, it is already being done by faculty on campus. For anyone looking to boost their creativity quotient, you need look no further than what is happening in your department or on campus. I appreciated all of the conversations that took place in the workshops I attended. I encourage you to attend upcoming CTE events and let us know what you are doing in your class.

Johnson, Steven (2010). Where good ideas come from. Retrieved October 31, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU.

Another Good Way to Learn: Debates — Justin He, Co-op Student

Learning, in many university students’ minds, is reading textbooks and attending lectures. Yes, this is one way to learn, but it should not be the only way for students to learn. It is true that students can learn knowledge by this way, but is this the best way for students to learn? Also, other than knowledge, what can they learn from just reading textbooks and attending lectures?

As we all have known in today’s society, students who only have “book” knowledge are not good enough. They require more realistic skills. The question is, how can they develop more skills? I am sure there are many ways to do that, but I suggest students to develop their skills by engaging in debates. You can develop many different useful skills for being a debater.

In general, debate helps you effectively to develop four skills:

  1. Communication
  2. Presentation
  3. Teamwork
  4. Critical thinking

A typical debate match has judges, a motion, which is a topic to debate, and at least six or more debaters. There must be two sides in a match, and debaters are evenly distributed on both sides. Each side is either in favour of or opposed to the motion. Therefore, it has a thesis statement and points to support its position.

Debaters need to figure out the most effective way to deliver all of this information to the judges. Otherwise, they will lose the match if no one can understand their speech. This is the time for people to improve their communication skill. It helps people to find a better way to deliver information and communicate with their audiences in their normal lives. Also, debaters need to clearly present their thesis and points during a debate match; therefore, this is an effective way to develop presentation skills too.

Debate is not an individual activity because a typical debate match involves more than one debater on one side. Debaters need to cooperate with teammates and debate with the other side. As we can see here, teamwork is extremely important. It is a great opportunity for debaters to build up the teamwork skill.

Furthermore, debaters should not only focus on their thesis and points. They have to think of the thesis and points of other side and find out a way to retort them. At this stage, debaters can improve or develop their critical thinking skill.

I suggest that professors consider having an in-class debate as one of the assignments for students. It will surely consume some of their lecture time for teaching; however, this assignment provides an opportunity for students to develop some important skills for their future. Therefore, it is worth to give up some teaching time to let students undertake an in-class debate.

Visualizations for Assessment and Learning — Mark Morton

Web 3.0, they say, is going to be a “semantic web,” which I take to mean that it’s a web which will allow us to easily explore relationships among large amounts of discrete bits of data. One way of exploring relationships, of course, is visually: humans can literally “see” patterns of relationships more easily than they can otherwise apprehend them. Examples abound, but one that I recently came across is especially interesting from an “assessment” point of view. It’s a visual depiction of comments that a class of students made on one another’s blogs. In the visualization, each student is represented by a small circle (or node) and the the comments that he or she made are represented by arrows leading to the nodes of other students. So, if Matthew commented on Ephraim’s blog once, then the arrow starts from Matthew’s node and points to Ephaim’s node. At a glance, it’s easy to see who has been most active in making comments, who has received most comments, and who hasn’t been active at all — and that information can clearly help an instructor with both formative and summative assessment. You can the visualization, which was made with the platform Many Eyes, here.

Another visualization tool that I recently came across is called DebateGraph, which is intended to help people map out the various ideas, positions, and evidence that make up complex arguments. At first glance, a DebateGraph visualization looks like an ordinary concept map, but as you click the various nodes, you see that each one dynamically changes: it becomes the central node, and new nodes — ones that are connected to it — jump into place. The platform is collaborative, so if you want to contribute to the argument, you just need to log in, navigate to the appropriate node, and then add your point. You can see an example of a visualization in DebateGraph here.

I’m a bit sceptical of DebateGraph’s “practical” implications: in other words, if your family is having argument about where to go for your summer vacation, I don’t think that using DebateGraph would be worth the investment of time it would take to map out the argument. But as a learning tool — that is, as a way of helping students untangle the complexities of, say, a geopolitical conflict or an ethical issue — I think that the very “deliberate” methodology of DebateGraph could be very useful.

Why should we care about student feedback? A new perspective – Mihaela Vlasea, CTE Graduate Instructional Developer

Consider the following question:

“As educators, given that we know more than the students on the subject we are teaching, why should we care about feedback from students in terms of how we are lecturing? Are we giving students too much freedom over our teaching methodology?”

Three main reasons come to mind when thinking about why I became involved with the Centre for Teaching Excellence as an Instructional Developer:  I love working with people, I enjoy teaching and I am always pursuing opportunities for improving my teaching skills. I am a strong advocate for the idea of a dynamic educator, one that is able to adapt not only to the classroom environment but also to the demands of the job market in preparing students for their future careers. With this I mind, I was quite surprised when I was faced with the above mentioned question. Continue reading Why should we care about student feedback? A new perspective – Mihaela Vlasea, CTE Graduate Instructional Developer

Privacy and Cloud-based Tools — Scott Anderson

There are many free tools and applications available on the web (in “the cloud,” so to speak) for instructors and students to use to support and enhance their teaching and learning. A few examples include:

The Art of Science – No Marks Attached — Lauren S. Singroy

Bacteriophage meets iPod Dance- by Lauren Singroy
Bacteriophage meets iPod Dance- by Lauren Singroy

As instructors, we often gripe about students not completing our assignments despite the marks attached to them.  We’re even more upset when we have spent so much time creating the assignment, one which we know would really help students learn if they would only do it.

An amazing class that exceeded my expectations in many regards especially in terms of the professor’s passion for the subject material, and his desire to help students think about this material beyond the four walls of a lecture hall: these are my sentiments after having taken Fundamentals of Microbiology (BIOL 140) with Dr. Josh NeufeldI entered BIOL 140 with two goals in mind: to fulfill a degree requirement and not to fail the biggest exam (with it being potentially worth 70% of my final grade) I would ever write at university. I came out of BIOL 140 having accomplished so much more than the latter two things: I gained a basic understanding of and interest in microbiology as a discipline, and discovered a new way of studying and thinking about the world around me.

One of Dr. Neufeld’s unique teaching methods was partially responsible for these pleasantly surprising outcomes. Early on in the semester, Dr. Neufeld announced the initiation of an art gallery, to which he encouraged all BIOL 140 students to submit artwork (e.g. drawings and paintings) having some relevance to the course. At the end of the semester, the BIOL 140 students would vote for their favourite gallery submission, and the winning artist would receive a prize. In preparing a submission for the gallery, I was forced to think about how I could create a piece of art that was relevant to microbiology, demonstrated my uniqueness as an artist, and would be capable of winning over my classmates – after all, they were the ones ultimately deciding which gallery submission would be named the class favourite. After some thought, I came up with an idea for a painting that I thought just might satisfy the aforementioned criteria. By combining two concepts that I hoped my classmates would be familiar with (bacteriophage and the “iPod dance”), I created an art-piece that was amusing to both my classmates and my professor.

The microbiology art gallery was not only effective in helping me engage with course material during the term, but also inspired me to be creative in studying for my final exam. I documented this creative process in the form of a stop-motion video to show fellow students that there is so much more to studying than memorizing course material in the days leading up to an exam. Similarly, there is so much more to teaching than having a professor stand at a podium and deliver one discourse after the next. I appreciate Dr. Neufeld giving the BIOL 140 students a chance to be creative in a class in which people wouldn’t –or at least, I know I didn’t – expect such an opportunity to arise, and I encourage other professors to do the same (or be willing to try an unconventional teaching method from time to time).
H. BSc. Candidate in the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences. You can see Lauren’s artwork in the Daily Bulletin.