Formative and Summative Assessment in Moodle

“Effective teachers use assessment activities strategically to motivate learners to engage successfully in productive learning activities (Department For Education and Skills2003, p.95).”

It is apparent that our society places a huge emphasis on assessment. It lets us know how we match up against others, and if we ended up completing our goals. In education, it is a fundamental aspects of a course, since it lets students know what they need to do to show that they have learned something, and lets the teachers know if or not the students got there. So,when I started designing my poetry unit using Moodle, it seemed like designing my assessments was a good place to start. I figured, that if I knew what I wanted my students to do to show me they learned what I wanted them to learn, it would be easier to design the learning activities that would let them be successful in the assessment. So once I selected the major poetry concepts I wanted to cover, I then began constructing various assessment activities for students to participate in. It was my hope that my assessment activities would not only serve as markers to show if and to what degree students were learning about poetry, but that students would find them interesting enough so that they were motivated and driven to want to learn.

For courses in the language arts especially, I believe that criteria-based assessments should be the dominant form of assessment, as these types of course-work assessments are a better predictor of long term learning of course content than are tests or quizzes (Gibbs and Simpson, 2005). Accordingly, I made sure that a large part of the student’s overall mark for this unit would be based on a criteria-based summative poetry anthology, and several formative assessments that would make use of Moodle’s various collaborative tools. Each lesson in the unit would then focus on a type of poem or poetic device that will be required for the student to know, so that they can be successful in completing their summative assessments that appear later in the unit.The formative assessments will take the form of collaborative activities, such as a discussion forums, chat features, or collaborative wikis, and will be introduced as a culminating assignment at the end of each lesson. In my opinion, these are excellent tools to use as formative assessments, since students can receive timely feedback from their fellow peers or instructor, and both the instructor and students have a record of the learning that is taking place. As Gibbs and Simpson point out, timely feedback is important, particularly for formative assessments (2005). It allows students to recognize the mistakes they are making, and provides them with opportunities to seek the necessary support so that they can correct their misconceptions before completing future formative and summative assessments.

In addition to these criteria-based assessments, I included a norm-based, summative assessment in the form of a quiz that students will need to complete in the second last week of the poetry unit. This quiz has many questions that will allow me, and the student completing it, to know if all the major concepts of the unit were grasped. Since much of the quiz is auto-assessed, it will provide me with immediate grading, saving me time from marking to do other activities, and allowing me to provide my students with prompt feedback about their results (Jenkins, 2004). This is important, because it allows students to revisit concepts that they had difficulty with before having to complete their final criteria-based, summative assessment the following week.

When creating the questions for the quiz, I tried to incorporate ideas I learned from Vito Perrone regarding authentic assessment (1991). It was important for me to construct questions that required students to use the knowledge they learned throughout the unit to analyze and create poetry, not just memorize an assortment of definitions. Subsequently, many of the questions asked students to analyze examples of poetry to identify various poetic devices. Additionally, in one of the two essay questions, students had to create a poem using a style we covered in the unit based upon an embedded image of a mountain landscape, and then write a short essay identifying the poetic devices they used and why they used them. For the final question of the quiz, I gave students the opportunity to contemplate and express their learning experiences by asking them to write about their personal reflections on the unit. Student reflections can be powerful assessment and learning tools, as it provides students the opportunity to summarize what they took away from the unit, as well as providing instructors with valuable feedback which they can use to evaluate their instructional design (Fade, 2002).

Designing these different assessment activities in Moodle has been a fantastic learning experience. The process has given me a more holistic perspective in regards to assessment, and how we as teachers can use assessment activities to motivate and engage our students in the learning process.

References

Department For Education and Skills. (2003). Towards a Unified e-Learning Strategy: consultation document, Nottingham: DfES Publications. Retrieved from https://www.education.gov.uk/consultations/downloadableDocs/towards%20a%20unified%20e-learning%20strategy.pdf

Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf

Fade, S. (2002). Learning and assessing through reflection: a practical guide. Practice-based Learning. Retrieved from  http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415537902/data/learning/9_Learning%20and%20Assessing%20Through%20Reflection.pdf

Jenkins, M. (2004).  Unfulfilled promise: Formative assessment using computer-aided assessment. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, i, 67-80. Retrieved from http://insight.glos.ac.uk/tli/resources/lathe/documents/issue%201/articles/jenkins.pdf

Perrone, V. (1991). Expanding student assessment. Alexandria, Va: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Retrieved from http://calteach.ucsc.edu/courses/documents/Hein%20assessment.pdf#page=33