Assessment
Reflection:
The activity to create an assessment tool in Moodle was a little difficult due to the content that I had selected for my course design. As I began the preparations for my assessment tool, I began to notice that design of my project was focused on the affective domain and that the assessment tool was normative based. Thus, my assessment tool is not a formative/summative tool for evaluating if the student had achieved the learning outcomes, but a tool to determine suitability for a position within the volunteer organization. The best candidate will get the job!
To create an assessment tool, I normally follow a simple set of steps:
- Determine the content of the test;
- Determine the standard that the student must achieve;
- Determine the test conditions (resources, timings, etc);
- Determine the appropriate format (types of questions, levels of learning, etc.); and
- Prepare test instructions (for student and invigilator).
The development of the Moodle assessment tool was a bit of a challenge. I think that the platform does not clearly indicate how to use some of the assessment tools. An example is the “short answer” question. In my experience, short answer is an answer that is less than 500 words. To create a question with an answer that fit this description, I had to select essay. Perhaps more experience with the Moodle platform would have made this assignment a little less frustrating, as I would not have had to build a question for each “type” just to understand the result.
Lastly, when I advise on the creation of assessment tools, I always ask the instructor to define the goal of the assessment tool. If the instructor does not clearly have the goal in mind, then the student can be assessed on criteria that may not be relevant to the learning objective.
Consider the following question.
Write an essay (2000 words) describing the difference between formative and summative assessment.
Is the goal of this essay to evaluate the students’ abilities to: spell; write in APA format; to employ proper essay form with thesis statement, or is the goal of the essay to evaluate the students’ ability to “describe the difference between formative and summative assessment”? To create a variety of questions, I did not focus on the actual wording of the questions, I focused on providing a variety of questions to meet the “criteria” for my own assignment.
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On another note….
If you are interested in evaluation of learners in the military, I have provided the following link. This content is very similar to what is outlined in our course website, but with a distinct “training” flavour.
Canadian Forces Individual Training and Education System. (1991). Evaluation of Learners. Retrieved online 09 March 2010 from the World Wide Web: http://www.cda-acd.forces.gc.ca/dte-die/downloads/cfites/cfitesvol07_e.pdf