Assessment for Learning

1. Assessment for Learning Mary Power and Monica Vesely January 2014

2. Workshop Outcomes By the end of this workshop, you should be able to: • Identify characteristics of effective assessment • Explain various types of assessment methods • Establish criteria for selecting appropriate methods

3. Outline • Characteristics of Effective Assessment • Types of Assessment • Assessment and Course Design • Key Assessment Decisions • Sample Tools • Multiple Choice Tests • Group Work and Teams

4. What is Assessment? Think, pair and share activity: • Independently answer the following questions on your worksheet (2 minutes): • Why do we assess? • For whom do we assess? • Share and discuss your answers with a partner (2 minutes) • Report back to group on your discussion (6 minutes)

5. Assessment • Any teaching tool that provides feedback to the student and/or the instructor on student learning • Remember that assessments are for the students and present a learning opportunity “What and how students learn depends to a major extent on how they think they will be assessed.” -- John Biggs Source: Biggs, J. (1999).Teaching for quality learning at university: What the student does. Bristol, PA: Open University Press.

6. AAHE’s Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning Good assessment: • Begins with educational values – vehicle for educational improvement • Reflects learning as multidimensional, integrated, and spread over time • Works best when program outcomes are clearly stated • Captures products and processes • Works best when it is on-going Source: Astin, A., Banta, T., Cross, P., et al. (1992). American Association for Higher Education.

7. Overview of Assessment Types

8. Exploring Assessment Types Group activity: • Form three groups • Each group is responsible for a different type of assessment: Group 1 – diagnostic, Group 2 – formative & Group 3 - summative • List assessment methods used for the assessment type defined by your group • Review as a group in 5 minutes

9. Examples of Assessment Tools Diagnostic • Concept maps • Prior knowledge assessment • Questionnaires • Concept Inventories Formative • iClickers • Mid-term survey (anonymous) • Reflection papers (authentic) • Online discussion boards • Exam Wrapper • Self-assessment quizzes Summative • Final exam • Peer assessments • Self-assessments • Poster presentations • Learning portfolio

10. Assessment and Course Design: Alignment Intended Learning Outcomes Concepts (Content & Skills) Teaching & Learning Assessment Methods

11. Course Planning Template

12. Key Assessment Decisions • Decide: • What You Assess • Where You Assess • When You Assess • Who Does the Assessment • How Authentic You Can Be Note: Examples given are primarily summative – can include formative elements as well

13. Decide: What You Assess and How Authentic You Can Be • Initial Context: • Statistics course • Essay assignments • Rarely show deep thinking • Consider: • Moving to a guided essay • Use to reveal assumptions that students bring to controversial questions • Respond to questions as an integrated paper

14. Guided Essay • Scenario • Researcher administers two inventories • Obtains a correlation coefficient of 0.5 between scores on the two inventories, p < 0.01 • Do you believe this shows a relationship? • Could people reasonably disagree with your conclusion? Why or why not? • Does this guided essay ignore ideas essential to your understanding of correlations? Explain your response. Adapted From: Wood, P.K. & Lynch, C.L. (1998). Campus strategies. Assessment Update. 10(2): 14-15.

15. Decide: Where and When You Assess • Initial Context: • Introductory Physics course • Procedural assignments & exams outside of class • Students frustrated, not grasping concepts • Consider: • Bringing ConcepTests into classroom (can do with clickers) and aligning exams with ConcepTests to reinforce learning • Concep Tests are used throughout the term to identify misconceptions/misinformation

16. Example of ConcepTest Question In the absence of air resistance, a dropped object accelerates downwards at 9.8 m/s2. If you throw the object downwards instead of releasing it, its downward acceleration after release is: a) less than 9.8 m/s2 b) 9.8m/s2 c) more than 9.8 m/s2 Adapted From: Mazur, E. (1997). Peer Instruction. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.

17. Decide: Who Does the Assessment • Initial Context: • Food Science course • Bi-weekly article responses • Students not using feedback in subsequent work • Consider: • Engaging students in the grading

18. Peer Review Process • Students submit responses on fewer articles but revise their work for final grading • Have peers provide feedback as formative assessment • Instructor marks revised version of response and other student’s feedback Adapted From: Gibbs, G. (1999). Using assessment strategically to change the way students learn. Assessment Matters. Eds. Brown, S. & A. Glasner. Philadelphia: SHRE & Open University Press. pp. 41-53.

19. Two Common Tools • Constructing Multiple Choice Tests • Assessing Group Work and Teams

20. Advantages of MCQs • Easy to grade • Objective grading • Standardized and can be statistically validated • Many concepts can be tested in a limited time (faster for students to answer) • Not a test of students writing ability

21. Disadvantages of MCQs • Time consuming to write good questions • Exclusively the instructor’s perspective • Difficult to write questions that test higher cognitive levels • Students may guess correctly • Good test takers may benefit

22. Guidelines for Constructing Multiple Choice Questions • Questions (Stem) construction • Alternatives (Item) construction Verify understanding by evaluating sample questions and discussing results with partner (6 minutes)

23. Bloom’s Taxonomy: A Background • Classification of levels of intellectual behavior important in learning. • Updated during the 1990's to reflect relevance to 21st century work • Originally created in and for an academic context to assist in the design and assessment of educational learning

24. Bloom’s Taxonomy Source: Anderson, L.W. & Krathwohl, D.R. (Eds.) (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York, NY: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.

25. Assessing for Higher Order Thinking in Multiple Choice Questions Activity: Given the examples of questions that test at various levels of the cognitive domain (in Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning), match the questions on the left to their corresponding cognitive category on the right

26. Why Group/Team Work? • Progression from passive learning to active learning • Encourages deep learning (active, learner-centered activities) • “deep learning is learning that takes root in our apparatus of understanding, in the embedded meanings that define us and that we use to define the world” (Tagg, 2003: 70) • Helps students acquire important collaborative skills • Communication; negotiation; self-initiative; resourcefulness; conflict management (Bryan, 2006)

27. Considerations What do we need to consider when implementing group/team work? • Do you have previous experience using groups/teams in your teaching? • What kinds of activities did you have them work on? • Were they successful? Additional Thoughts: • Collaborative learning: • Work together in small groups towards a common goal. • Focus on learning together, rather than individually. • Cooperative learning: • Structured form of group work where students pursue common goals • Individual Assessment (with cooperative incentives)

28. Grading Groups and Teams

29. Concluding Thoughts • Choose learning assessments wisely; they are often where students focus time and attention • Use learning outcomes as key criteria in deciding on assessment strategies • Blend formative and summative • Consider your own workload