“If the only tool you have is a hammer, [you] treat everything as if it were a nail.” – Abraham Maslow (1966)
One of the areas that most fascinates me as a math teacher is assessment. It is a topic that I have wrestled with since I became a teacher and saw early on how inauthentic it can be. We looked at assessment in one of my other MET classes, and I wanted to remind myself of some of the key ideas I have come across as ETEC 533 winds down.
The academic test, and especially the multiple choice test, may be one of the best expressions of Malsow’s saying. For almost 200 years, we have used tests to find out what content information is stored inside a student’s head. In his video, Eric Mazur (2012) describes in his video how irrelevant this process is now that information is so readily available, saying that any question that can be answered with a google search is a bad question.
Is the test as we knew it dead? It seems the answer is both yes and no. Mazur (2012) talks about tests changing to be more process oriented – that the modern test should be open book, with all tools available in use, and even collaborative at times. Conversely, David Nicol (2007) shows a way forward using multiple choice questions (MCQ) as a formative assessment tool. His 7 principles of good feedback can be applied to MCQ’s to transform the method in which the old tool is used.
Both of these thinkers give ideas that resonate with me in my teaching practice. It is also connected very closely with work I did previous class when asked to find ways to use a digital tool for self assessment. Below is a video of how I have used MCQ’s in google forms to transition the academic test from the exclusive domain of teach control, and give much of the power of assessment to my students. This tool actually became very versatile once I stopped thinking of it as a hammer.
Questions remain for me. How else could we use the data that we collect?
I think the usefulness of the tool for my students is twofold – formative self-assessment, and bolstering their positive feelings about themselves, math, and themselves as mathematicians. In what other ways can this tool be used for my students?
References
Maslow, A. H. (1966). The psychology of science: A reconnaissance ([1st]. ed.). New York: Harper & Row.
Mazur, E (2012) Why You Can Pass Tests and Still Fail in the Real World (9:32)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyikmLxntrk
Nicol, D. (2007) E‐assessment by design: using multiple‐choice tests to good effect, Journal of Further and Higher Education, (31),1, pp. 53-64, http://ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/login?url=http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03098770601167922