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Methods and Procedures of Students' Learning Assessment. Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava www.stuba.sk Fa c ult y of Civil Engineering Gabriela Pavlendova. Assessment makes teaching into teaching. Mere presentation—without assessment is not teaching.
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Methods and Procedures of Students' Learning Assessment Slovak University of Technology in Bratislavawww.stuba.skFaculty of Civil Engineering Gabriela Pavlendova
Assessment makes teaching into teaching. • Mere presentation—without assessmentis not teaching. • Assessment is not a discrete process, but integral to every stage of teaching, from minute to minute as much as module to module.
Informal Assessment going on all the time • student answers a question, • asks • starts looking out of the window • cracks a joke He is providing you with feedback about whether learningistaking place. It's more an evaluation of the teaching session than about his learning, but the two are inextricable.
Each Assessment is Ultimately Subjective However, we can still make every effort to ensure that assessment is • valid, • reliable • fair.
Validity A valid form of assessment measures what it is supposed to measure. • It does not assess memory, when it is supposed to be assessing problem-solving (and vice versa). • It does not grade someone on the quality of their writing, when writing skills are not relevant to the topic being assessed, but it does when they are. • It does seek to cover as much of the assessable material as practicable, not relying on inference from a small and arbitrary sample (and here it spills over into reliability).
Reliability • Or "replicability". • A reliable assessment will produce the same results on re-test, and will produce similar results with a similar cohort of students, so it is consistent in its methods and criteria.
Fairness • This is really an aspect of validity, but important enough to note in its own right. • Fairness ensures that everyone has an equal chance of getting a good assessment.
Purposes of Assessment • To determine whether and to what extent students have learned specific knowledge or skills (content goals). The assessment should focus on outcomes or products of student learning, such as objective assessments and projects/products. • To diagnose student strengths and weaknesses and plan appropriate instruction (process goals). To understand where the student is going wrong, you need to assess the process as well as the product, through activities such as interviews, documented observations, student learning logs and/or self-evaluations, behavioral checklists, and student think-alouds in conjunction with multiple-choice tests.
Forms of Aassessment Summative assessment- which says whether or not you have"passed". It is—or should be—undertaken with reference to all the objectives or outcomes of the course, and is usually fairly formal. Note that all summative assessment can also be formative, if the feedback offered is sufficient. Formative assessment is going on all the time. Its purpose is to provide feedback on what students are learning: to the student: to identify achievement and areas for further work to the teacher: to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching to date, and to focus future plans.
Examples of Formative Assessment, which Can Become also Part of Summative Assessment • Peer assessment • Initial assessment • Middle assessment • Problem sheets • Short- answer questions etc.
No Assessment is Perfect • Assuming it is possible to tell who is competent in a given area and who is not. • Such an idealistic construction is known as a "gold standard". In the case in the diagram, about 80% are competent (or "deserve to pass") and about 20% aren't.
AssumingHighly Valid AssessmentScheme • It comes to the "right" answer about 80% of the time. Again, this is idealistic, because we rarely have a clue as to the quantifiable validity of such a scheme
What happens when we use this scheme with our group of students?
We end up with: • 64% "True Positives": they are competent, and the assessment scheme agrees that they are. In other words, they passed and so they ought to have done. • 16% "True Negatives", who failed and deserved to do so. • 16% "False Positives": they passed, but they did not deserve to do so, and • 4% "False Negatives", who failed, but should have passed.
Is there a Solution? • We have both unfair, and a potentially serious technical problem. Imagine a pilot had qualified as a False Positive! • There is of course a solution: raise the "pass" threshold. Unfortunately it's wrong. • All it does it to change the proportion of False Positives and False Negatives. This may be the right thing to do if the most important thing is to eliminate the False Positives (the people who qualified who weren't competent), but the cost to the poor characters who should have passed and didn't gets even higher.
What Can We Do? We have to live with it, and make strenuous efforts to improve Validity. • Do not rely on a single assessment exercise • Use a variety of different approaches • In our assessment plan, methods and procedures should meet the following criteria: Clarity - methods and procedures are clear • Measurements occur at appropriate times in the certificate program • Measurements are appropriate for the SLOs (Student Learning • Outcomes) • Methods and procedures reflect an appropriate balance of direct and • indirect methods • Examples of certificate assessment tools
Test Administration 1. Write explicit directions for a test. The directions should include: • How much time is available, will extra time be allowed • What to do if finish early • How to record answers • Whether to show work on problems • Weight of different sections, items • Whether there is a penalty for guessing • What can be used during the test, e.g., calculators, crib sheet • If test booklet will be collected, etc • Directions on how to use the answer sheet if at all different from the usual way 2. State your cheating policy on the test or the directions and enforce it. (Remember it is easier to prevent cheating than to deal with the consequences later.) 3. Explain your grading system on the first day of class 4. Let students know how they are doing in the class throughout the semester 5. Help students to realize that they earn their grades 6. Check to see that your students did work they handed in for group projects, term papers, etc. 7. Get students self-assess on their preparation and performance on tests
Students Lack of Insight into their Own Preparation and Performance on Tests HELP THEM, ask them to reflect with questions like these: • Did you study the right material? • Did you put the right emphasis on your studying on • concepts or the big picture • Material in the reading, but not covered in class • What could you do differently/or how can you prepare for the next test better? • Would studying in groups be effective? • If so, what type of students should I meet with? • What type of group study is effective? • Did you begin studying early enough to master the material? • How well did you know the material? • Where were there gaps in your understanding?
Measurements are Appropriate for the SLOs • What important cognitive skills do I want my students to develop? Select no more than three to five skills per subject area. • What social and affective skills do I want my students to develop? (e.g., to work independently, to develop a spirit of teamwork and skill in group work, to be persistent in the face of challenges, to have a healthy skepticism about current arguments and claims, etc.) • What metacognitive skills do I want my students to develop? • What types of problems do I want my students to be able to solve? • What concepts and principles do I want my students to be able to apply? THEN • Prioritize these outcomes. • List your final set of skills, processes, and dispositions (by subject area, if desired).
Finks Taxonomy • 1. Foundational Knowledge. Foundational Knowledge includes all of the content, ideas, and information that you want your students to know at the end of the semester. • 2. Application. The Application taxon encompasses critical, creative, and practical thinking, as well as additional skill sets that may be beneficial to students. • 3. Integration.Integration includes connecting different ideas that might appear in different disciplines or across the lifespan. • 4. Human Dimension. The Human Dimension taxon helps assess if students learn more about themselves and others. It stresses the human factor and gives human significance to learning. • 5. Caring. Caring is the taxon that provides the motivation and energy for learning by developing new interests, feelings, and values associated with the course material. • 6. Learning How to Learn. The Learning How to Learn taxon provides the ability for long-term learning by teaching students to become self-directed learners.
SOLO Taxonomy • The SOLO taxonomy stands for: • Structure ofObservedLearningOutcomes • It describes level of increasing complexity in a student's understanding of a subject, through five stages, and it is claimed to be applicable to any subject area. Not all students get through all five stages, of course, and indeed not all teaching (and even less "training") is designed to take them all the way.
Krathwohl's Affective Domain Taxonomy. The taxonomy is ordered according to the principle of internalization. • Receiving is being aware of the existence of certain ideas, material, or phenomena and being willing to tolerate them. • Responding is committed in some small measure to the ideas, materials, or phenomena involved by actively responding to them. • Valuing is willing to be perceived by others as valuing certain ideas, materials, or phenomena. • Organization is to relate the value to those already held and bring it into a harmonious and internally consistent philosophy. • Characterization by value or value set is to act consistently in accordance with the values he or she has internalized.
External Assessment of SLOs Possibillities
