May 14 2011
Assessment
My first reaction to creating an Assessment before I built my course, was a bit of confusion as to what I was going to include on the quiz. Then it occured to me, that I was forgetting about Backward Design, or Planning with the End in Mind – whatever you want to call it – Good planning requires beginning with what you want students to know, understand, or do – and then plan how you will assess that knowledge or skill – before you plan the instruction. So I finally got to return to a practice that I have been preaching about ever since I left the classroom. How quickly I forgot!
I knew the key understandings that I wanted my participants to grasp by the completion of the course, and these became my topic headings. Good assessment is not new, we have been grappling with it for decades – but the shift to greater emphasis on Assessment For Learning and As Learning is a big change for some of our teachers – especially in secondary schools. So this course is going to be designed to ensure that teachers really dig deeply into the new policy document.
From my experience this year, most teachers shelved the Growing Success document ( a hefty tome of 168 pages) after quickly checking out page 43 (how to deal with late and missed assignments) without taking the time to read the rest (which has very descriptive explanations of the how and why). So this will be an opportunity to read and discuss sections that are critical for ensuring that classroom assessment really is about improving student learning.
Creating this quiz in a new format (Moodle) was a challenge for me, but through the use of the many video tutorials, and the advice of colleagues in the discussion forums, I was able to create a basic quiz that I actually might tweak a little more by adding more questions as I build the rest of the course. My current set of questions are directed mostly to secondary teachers and I want to ensure that I do not neglect the work of the elementary teachers – although I must say, they are doing an amazing job of assessment for learning already!
Creating an assessment after 7 years away from the classroom made me “walk the walk” and recall how difficult it is to come up with good questions, but to also overcome the limitations of the platform – short answer questions pose a real challenge in an auto-assess format. I learned about the ‘*’ useage, but it does still limit how a participant can show their thinking. The essay questions will require a time delay before a student gets the feedback from the teacher, so I added the requirement that they post their answer in a discussion forum in Module 5 with the additional requirement that they provide each other with feedback – Getting students to do most of the work is the idea! And it will give them additional practice on providing descriptive feedback for their own students.
My quiz can be found in my Moodle site in Module 6: Final Quiz