Assessment
Check Point #1
Overall I found the exercise of building a quiz in Moodle to be relatively straight forward from a technical standpoint. Although I am sure I likely missed some of the technical requirements that we are being assessed on, I am sure that once these are pointed out they will be obvious enough and not difficult to correct. And overall, after a bit of fooling around, I did not find it overly frustrating (as it often is with new technology) trying to get the quiz to behave as I wanted it to. Moodle appears to be quite user friendly in this regard.
What is more difficult, however, is trying to build a meaningful assessment tool based on a course that is not already built, for students I do not already have. This required much thought and speculation and because of that in particular, I found this to be a very useful endeavor for advancing my thinking.
I tried to build this quiz as a formative exercise. I also tried to make it quite easy for anybody to get the correct answers for the multiple choice, matching, and short answer questions, particularly by allowing 24 hours to complete. The hope here was to try and make the quiz feel more like ‘coursework’ than a quiz, and I even named it “Check Point #1” rather than “Exam #1” or “Quiz #1”:
“Students consider coursework to be fairer than exams, to measure a greater range of abilities than exams and to allow students to organize their own work patterns to a greater extent (Kniveton, 1996).” (Gibbs and Simpson pg. 7)
And as I now reflect, I might actually have given even more time, perhaps as long as a week, to complete. I think that would perhaps make the exercise even more useful for student learning. Of course, by adding additional time, expectations would also need to be adjusted.
Also, I am quite concerned about the ramifications of offering feedback that is heavily quantitative, especially at an early stage in the course, which is when I was imagining this quiz would be presented.
“A recent study at the Open University suggested that maintaining motivation was the most important and influential issue for new students for their first assignment in a course (Gibbs & Simpson,2002). If a student is looking for encouragement and only receives corrections of errors this may not support their learning in the most effective way.” (Gibbs and Simpson pg. 18)
My concern is about what quantitative assessment alone does to levels of trust and motivation and to the limitations it presents for demonstrating knowledge in the type of learning environment I hope to create.
“A grade is likely to be perceived by the student as indicating their personal ability or worth as a person as it is usually ‘norm-referenced’ and tells you, primarily, where you stand in relation to others. A poor grade may damage a student’s ‘self-efficacy’, or sense of ability to be effective. Yorke (2001) elaborates on the positive or negative ways in which formative assessment can affect student retention and emphasizes its role in ‘academic integration’ (Tinto, 1993). In contrast, feedback on its own is more likely to be perceived as a comment on what has been learnt. In the absence of marks it has been reported that students read feedback much more carefully (Black & William, 1998) and use it to guide their learning. (Gibbs and Simpson, pg. 11)
The importance of feedback and the impact it has, according to Gibbs and Simpson, is one of the major reasons I weighted the essay questions as heavily as I did.
Although I am trying to stick to my ‘Flight Path’ as closely as I can to build a generic enough course shell, I also gave an awful lot of consideration to how this assessment tool would impact aboriginal learners. There is strong evidence to suggest that instructional design and assessment techniques that do not take cultural difference into consideration can represent significant barriers to aboriginal learners.
“Aboriginal students may bring a set of life experiences and responses to the classroom that are significantly different than those of most non- Aboriginal students. These learner characteristics determine the instructional and assessment strategies that will be the most effective for Aboriginal students. Aligning assessment approaches to match students’ life experiences and culturally-based responses ensures that assessment practices are fair, inclusive and authentic, and that they contribute to student learning and overall sense of connection to learning.” (Our Words, Our Ways: Teaching First Nations, Metis and Inuit Learners, pg. 113)
As such, I tried to really downplay the importance of getting a good grade in the instructions and the feedback provided. Additionally, at least one of the questions is built to help guide how the course will move forward. That was done because I believe that flexibility is one of the greatest strengths of online learning and I hope that students will become active drivers in terms of what the course can add to their learning experience:
“Regardless of the formal role of the teacher, online learning creates an opportunity for flexibility and revision of content in situ that was not provided by older forms of mediated teaching and learning.” (Anderson, pg. 4)
I also tried to use various forms of multi-media within the quiz as well as to alternate the question content between language, story and technology based to reflect the specific project. I think this matrix would be useful in any other digital storytelling coursework as well, although language might not be quite as important a consideration in other projects.
Overall, after discovering that the technical requirements were not all that onerous (at least they didn’t appear to be 😉 I found that this was a particularly reflective exercise. This required careful consideration of what questions to include and why, much more than it required simply pushing the right buttons.
References:
Anderson, T. (2008). Teaching in an Online learning Context: Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Athabasca University.
Gibbs, G. & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, i, 3-31.
Our Words, Our Ways: Teaching First Nations, Metis and Inuit Learners (2005) accessed Feb 18, 2012 http://education.alberta.ca/media/307199/words.pdf
*After finishing the exercise and reflecting a little both on this and one of the discussion posts, I started thinking about referencing within an assessment. That is honestly something I hadn’t thought about too much before. As a result I decided I had better add the following special thanks, just in case.
With special thanks to:
The Royal BC Museum for the images in question #6
PC Magazine for the root definitions in question #5
And the National Film Board of Canada for the Short Film in question #3
FirstVoices.com for teaching me how to say ‘Grandfather’ in Haisla