Assessment (formative or summative) will always be a challenge for me as an educator. What to test? How to test my students? Is the assessment completely fair? Did I give them too much time to prepare – maybe too little? Maybe a written test isn’t the way to assess this time around? Maybe a combination of hands-on and a written test? So many questions/challenges related to assessing – I think it will never be completely solved (for me anyway) within my educational career as a teacher.
This course is great because I get to practice using software that is similar to what I want to use to set up future online material for my students.
I geared my communication tool activity and this assessment activity on grade 6 science curriculum (since I teach grade 6 subjects). I know our instructor, John, can view my quiz from my Vista working shell – but there seems to be no way for me to link it so that anyone can view it and try it.
Like other students, it took me a good two hours to come up with this online 90-minute (one doesn’t have to use the entire time – but there is no rush) science quiz which is out of 29 marks. I think the hardest part was creating the matching questions as I didn’t know how many matches to put down per question. At the end, I made up three questions with five or four terms to be matched with five or four definitions. I related the communication tool activity to climate change and the assessment activity to electricity – both topics covered in BC grade 6 science curriculum.
Similiar to what others shared, my concern is how would I know if any of my students are using a textbook at home while writing the quiz. I guess to combat that problem, I can have students write the test in the computer lab – but wouldn’t that defeat the one of the major purposes of having online school (ie. to be at home going through the material and writing the test)?
Thanks.