Assessment

E-Portfolio Assignment #4: Assessment Tools

As I was creating the quiz for my Moodle site, I reflected on the Gibbs and Simpson (2004) article and considered how it fit in with what I was doing.  I let it inform my practice while creating the quiz.  Although Gibbs and Simpson focused on higher education, I felt that I was able to relate the article to the middle school age group that I teach.  I considered several aspects of assessment while creating the quiz.

Formative Vs. Summative

I fully endorse the idea brought up by Gibbs and Simpson that assessment should be about student learning instead of based primarily on measurement.  I think that this is especially important for the student demographic and age group that I work with.  Even at 11 – 13 years old, many of the students that I teach are highly motivated by grades.  They don’t understand that it is the learning itself that will help them to become clearer thinkers and give them more life skills because the grade – the measure of learning as opposed to the knowledge itself – is what will be important in determining their placement in programs as they get older.   In addition, the grade itself is what is most important to many of their parents.   In my class, I try to limit the anxiety and pressure that ‘the mark’ creates in students by following my school district’s policy of not assigning percentages to any piece of work, test or exam until the students reach grade 10.  In order to encourage learning for its own sake, and to get kids to actually pay attention and learn from the feedback given, I use rubrics for most of my assessment.  I have explained my use of rubrics and my marking policy to parents on my class website.  It can be accessed here.

Since my philosophy of assessment is based around moving student learning forward using rubrics and individual feedback, I often struggle with the use of quizzes and tests for summative assessment.   My first inclination when creating the quiz for my Moodle site was to use it as a way to assess student prior knowledge and allow for formative learning.  I started creating a quiz called ‘What do you already know about the Holocaust’.  In this quiz, I allowed for unlimited attempts and chose the adaptive mode so that students could respond as many times as necessary to get the question correct.  For each question, I provided feedback that included a link to information about the question so that students who answered incorrectly could read about the topic and then come back to answer the question on the quiz.  In order to inform my own teaching, I chose to apply a penalty to each question.  Students answering more than once would receive a lower mark.  That way the final score would give me an idea about student knowledge levels coming into the course.

After checking in with Dr. Egan, I understood that it would be best to create a summative quiz to complete my course assignment.  Since that is the case, I moved on from the first quiz that I created to begin a second, summative style quiz called ‘quiz on Holocaust history’.   The summative nature of this quiz makes sense because the unit will be based around literature circle readings and students need a solid foundation in basic Holocaust history in order to understand the context of the books that they are reading.  This quiz will be counted as part of the assessment for the blended Moodle unit that I am creating.   For this quiz, I created a 30 minute time limit although I can relate to the point made by David Evans on his blog that the countdown box may distract and annoy instead of being informative.

I chose to display all the questions on one page so that the student can get an overview of what is expected and thus diminish anxiety.  This also allows for students to answer the questions in any order that they feel comfortable.  For example, some may choose to do the essay questions first.  I did, however, choose to keep the questions in the same order every time because my intent was to put the concrete knowledge questions first and move toward more higher level thinking questions at the end of the quiz.

I chose to allow two attempts, but when students retake the quiz, their attempts don’t build on each other.  They will have to begin with a fresh quiz on their second attempt.  I feel that this is a fair way to assess their knowledge because they get a chance to see the quiz twice but they may not remember their first answer.   I also chose to give the students the highest mark that they earned from the attempts.

I did provide some overall feedback for the quiz but, as Gibbs and Simpson (2004) point out, feedback needs to be specific in order to be useful.  Since the overall feedback is based on marks, it is quite general and may not allow students to move forward in their learning.  I think that the feedback provided after every question is much more powerful because it is specific enough to clearly show students where they went wrong and can “develop understanding through explanations” (Gibbs and Simpson, 2004 p.19) .  I appreciate the timely nature of the feedback provided and, since the students will need to use the information in this quiz for the rest of this unit, the specific feedback after each question will help them in the rest of the course.

Generally, I enjoyed the process of creating the quiz.  I haven’t used either Moodle or computer based assessment and feedback before so I experienced a learning curve to creating the quiz and setting up the entire site, but I have enjoyed the process of relating my learning through the course readings into building a comprehensive quiz that informs student learning.

Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. Retrieved on June 27 from
http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf