I’ve had a great experience teaching undergrads at the University of Regina. It’s been a great way to try out some ideas and try and build on George Siemens’ idea of connectivism as well as everything else I’ve learned from my network.
I’ve spent a great deal of time over the past number of years studying and leading changes in assessment in our school division. So after leading workshops and discussion with teachers, it was an opportunity to practice the beliefs and strategies I held firmly.
We have set these seven principles to guide assessment practices in our division:
1. Students are the key assessment users.
2. A balance of assessment for and of learning should be used.
3. Assessment should be constructive; it should focus on achievement and progress.
4. Assessment and instruction are interdependent.
5. Good quality assessments must be followed by effective communication.
6. Assessment expectations and curricular outcomes should be communicated clearly to students from the beginning.
7. Meaningful and appropriate assessments should include evidence about student achievement in the areas of content, process and product.
So how did I do? Well I hoped that my students felt they were part of the assessment. Their blogs served as their personal reflection tool and they did an outstanding job at analyzing their beliefs and sharing their frustrations and challenges. In this way, they led much of their own learning. Concepts of “assessment for” and “assessment of” learning were both in action. I tried to guide and provide feedback throughout their endeavors and was also able to send out a mid-term report that included a grade and evaluation of their progress. I certainly tried to build on achievement and progress. Using assessment to change instruction is one area I’m not sure I was able to achieve. The idea that assessment changes instruction is very powerful. Certainly I will take student feedback and learning to change instruction for next time, but the short time frame of the class made this very difficult. Between emails and blog comments, I tried to provide each of my 14 students will regular input. An online class can be very isolated and requires special attention. As the course progressed, students began doing this for each other; that was great to see. The expectations for this class was to experience that:
- Learning is social and connected
- Learning is personal and self-directed
- Learning is shared and transparent
- Learning is rich in content and diversity
These ideas are difficult to assess and grade. Student’s post demonstrate their understanding of these ideas and I have to trust that they did experience this in varying degrees. How important is it to break down each of the ideas into measurable data? Perhaps I could have broken these idea down further. Evidence of their learning was demonstrated in their blog posts, weekly assignments and synchronous sessions.
You’ll notice our principles say nothing about grades. I hate grades, especially using a 100 point scale. They’re fake. I have a hard time telling one student they received a 89 and another a 84. I’m not smart enough to tell the difference. We continue to perpetuate the use of grades to rank students. I hope my students leave this class with having experienced the ideas I’ve outlined and not a grade. Anyways, I digress.
So overall I’d give myself 84 . Let’s just say I got most of it right but will work on a few other things.
[tags]uregina,assessment, prairiesouth,grades[/tags]
And now, if you’re up for something a little different to stretch yourself: Assessment As Learning: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/assess/as/index.asp
Much appreciate the sentiments woven throughout this post as I prepare to embark upon this new (yet familiar) journey with my kids starting this coming Wednesday. Been a few years since I’ve had to rigorously contemplate the relationship between learning and assessment. A great post to wake up to this morning, my friend! Thanks!
Dean, I can identify with many of the sentiments you express here. As I move to make my teaching more social, interactive, and self-directed, the part with which I struggle most is assessment. I think that for me, the biggest issue is that I have a hard time transferring how the assessment looks in my mind to a traditional 100-pt, A-F scale. So far, the more holistic A-F approach has been more or less manageable, but then I have to deal with questions of grade inflation (“What do you mean they all got As and Bs? That’s not a well distributed curve!”), and I confess, I’m having a hard time breaking myself of that mindset, too.
Number grades are an unfortunate fact of public school teaching, at least where I am – the push is on for data, data, data across the board, which is not in and of itself a bad thing. What I find difficult is translating the evidence of learning to a valid number grade, which I’m required to do. It’ll be the part of my job with which I struggle most this coming year; thanks for sharing your reflections on this issue.
Damian,
As you are aware, this battle rages on everywhere. I agree that the A-F scale is better and yet I would prefer to avoid rankings whenever possible. There are fewer kids motivated by grades and even those that are, shouldn’t they be motivated simply to learn? We talk about life long learning as being a primary goal in education but do damage to that belief via rankings.
Ewan’s link and work in Scotland begins to get at this idea.
Thanks for chatting.
I’m going to be paying close attention to Christian as he embarks on all this with fresh eyes.
As I said in our chat conversation earlier this week, allowing students to do self-assessment has been a challenging thing for me. I want my six-year-olds to all feel good about themselves. It has been interesting for me to see that as I give them more ownership of their learning by telling them about the expectations of our class and curriculum, they have been able to respond and often articulate very clearly what they still have to learn, even at such a young age. Of course, there are always a couple of students who think they can already do addition because they can tell you that 1+1=2, or read because they have memorized a favourite book. For the most part, though, they are reflective and honest about where they are and where they would like to be. When they have achieved their goal, they are very proud of what they have done, and have a more authentic sense of satisfaction.
Thanks for sharing your assessment ideas. At the beginning of the year I read a lot of blogs that comment on which tools they are going to use in the coming year and why. Assessment is such a critical component of what we do and needs to well thought out as we plan our curriculum. Thanks for bringing to the forefront.
I also snooped on your district website and found some gems. 🙂
Patrick Lewis, one of my education professors at the university is a big advocate for personal assessment. He really taught us their importance.
One thing that I feel can show through on a personal assessment is the effort that a learner put in. Although they maybe didn’t do a project as well as someone else, or they did not score a 100% on a test, they put in a lot of effort. Through personal assessment, I believe that the assessor can gain an authentic sense of how much effort the learner put in. The amount of effort put in should also be used as a measurment when assessing learners.
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