Interestingly enough, I believe that I have had the exact same issue as Boris regarding the incomprehension towards the periodic table. That being said, my experience in general agrees with Boris and is similar to the observations by Gibbs, Simpson, Gravestock, and Hills (2005); students perform better on assignments than on quizzes and tests. I was wondering if in part this might be that students consider assignment as more relevant and authentic.
In my personal experience, assessments have mainly served only one of the purposes described by Bates (2014): to assess knowledge « in terms of desired learning goals or outcomes». A few years back, our department was highly encouraged to have the same assessments across all teachers of a subject, which was probably intended to mean the same summative assessments, yet was interpreted as all assessment; restricting the role of formative assessment as a learning opportunity. The assessments, created by a single teacher, were at times provided to the rest of the staff one week before the assessment was to be written; as such it created confusion among the students trying to understand which elements were most relevant to study. In some rare cases, this confusion lead to doubt in the minds of the students regarding whether or not the teacher was actually covering the appropriate material. Teachers would create a mad-dash review covering the assessed material a few days before the quiz/test was given. An undesired effect of this was that students did not properly prepare for the assessment; simply waiting for the review. Eventually, due to time constraints, formative assessments and assignments were faded out (10 -15% of the grade), replaced by summative multiple choice questions MCQ quizzes and tests to mimic the final ministerial exam; 60% of which is MCQ. Needless to say, instead of preparing the students for the final, this might have actually discouraged many students as it focussed on rote memorization. We therefore only focussed on assessing competency acquisition and never provided assessment to help learning.
In an attempt to change this situation, a few of my colleagues and I put in place exit card strategies upon which we could provide feedback and used clickers throughout our lessons and end-of year reviews to provide direct feedback to the students and the teacher regarding the general comprehension of a topic. We also began to experiment with GoConqr an internet site which enables you to create online quizzes, flashcards and other forms of assessment. However as these were only put in place at the end of the year, the students, who were not used to completing parts of their course online, were not too sure about their use and did not use these resources to their full potential. Boris is quite fortunate in the sense that as his students already use Moodle, using the evaluation tools within or with another provider is not that far a stretch for his students.
As a side note, the use of MCQs as described by Jenkins (2004)really intrigued me. Although I am not too sure how to best combine MCQ with case studies, I am looking forward to trying this in my future.
References:
Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age. Open Textbook.
Gibbs, G., Simpson, C., Gravestock, P., & Hills, M. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.
Jenkins, M. (2004). Unfulfilled promise: formative assessment using computer-aided assessment. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 67-80.