Technology Integration for Meaning Classroom Use: Chapter 7 - Assessment and Evaluation

Editor's Notes

• #3: Set Goals: The textbook is organized around the ISTE NETS-T, with specific standards addressed beginning in chapter 3. Set Goals by determining the ISTE NETS-T addressed in each chapter. 2. Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments Teachers design, develop, and evaluate authentic learning experiences and assessments incorporating contemporary tools and resources to maximize content learning in context and to develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes identified in the NETS-S. Teachers: d. provide students with multiple and varied formative and summative assessments aligned with content and technology standards and use resulting data to inform learning and teaching Note: Standard 2.a is addressed in Chapter 4, 2.b in Chapter 5, and 2.c in Chapter 6.
• #4: Set Goals: Review the outcomes to be addressed in the chapter. In this chapter, you will: Develop assessments and scoring practices that are aligned with content and technology standards. Incorporate a variety of appropriate technology-based resources for assessing learning into your instruction. Use technology applications to communicate student performance data and report this evidence to parents, administrators, and other stakeholders. Use data from multiple measures and resources to assess student use of technology as required by the NETS-S.
• #5: Take Action: Your actions include reviewing the content addressed in the textbook.
• #7: Assessments are an important part of the learning process. Classroom assessments that promote learning: involve sharing learning goals with students aim to help students know and recognize the standards for which they are aiming involve students in self-assessment provide feedback that leads to students recognizing their next steps and how to take them are based on the belief that every student can improve involve both teachers and pupils reflecting on assessment data (Assessment Reform Group, 1999, p. 7)
• #8: Feedback is critical to formative assessment. Students will benefit most when they receive feedback about the quality of their work and suggestions for improvement—not just whether their responses were right or wrong. To improve learning, they must also receive feedback about their progress during instruction. Outcome feedback, knowing whether a response is correct or not, is the simplest and most common type of feedback, but it provides little guidance to students (Butler & Winne, 1995). Early drill-and-practice software often provided this type of feedback, in which student responses were boldly acknowledged as “CORRECT” or “INCORRECT,” but rarely with an explanation why. For formative assessment to achieve maximum benefit, feedback must provide an explanation of why an answer is correct or incorrect, should support students when they are using appropriate strategies and content knowledge, and guide them when they are not. Cognitive feedback refers to feedback that helps students develop a better understanding of what is expected for performance, how their current understanding or skill levels compare to those expectations, and how they might improve their performances (Butler & Winne, 1995).
• #11: When you develop assessment instruments you need to consider the same three components you considered when writing instructional objectives: 1) the behavior, skill, knowledge, or attitude to be demonstrated, 2) the conditions under which they will be demonstrated, and 3) the criteria that specify the level of performance or knowledge required. As you may know, the behavior, skills, knowledge, or attitudes your students are required to master are outlined in your content standards (see Chapter 3). Performance conditions identify equipment, supplies, or other resources, including technologies, which are allowed during the assessment of student skills. They also include any time limits or other constraints imposed upon students as they are demonstrating the skill. Criteria clearly describe what acceptable performance looks like. Criteria can be conveyed through rubrics, checklists, or a simple list of what an acceptable answer should include (e.g., “Your report should include five sources and no grammatical or factual errors.”). When shared with students before embarking on an activity, students can set goals for their own performances and can continue to monitor their performances throughout their learning, whether creating a web page, writing an essay, or preparing a presentation for the class. They can also determine the essential elements of complex projects, making the project seem more approachable even to struggling students.
• #13: Remember that one of the first ways that teachers build their skills with new technologies is to replicate familiar strategies. Forced-choice question formats are the customary multiple-choice, true/false, matching, and fill-in-the-blank question formats that are popular in large-scale exams and that have influenced the assessment practices of many teachers.
• #16: Because it is difficult to write high-quality, forced-choice questions that truly tap into higher-order thinking skills, open-ended questions are often employed when students have to demonstrate higher levels of cognitive skill, such as the application or synthesis of rules, procedures, or concepts or to demonstrate creative and original thoughts and ideas.
• #17: There are a variety of ways students can demonstrate mastery through performance. Performance-based assessments are possible in all content areas but may most easily be exemplified by domains that require oral communication skills or the development of psychomotor skills in conjunction with other content knowledge, such as sports, the fine arts, and many lab sciences. Performances can very quickly extend beyond the demonstration of rudimentary skill and can require students to demonstrate very complex behaviors that may exhibit choices based on personal values and creativity.
• #18: Related to performance-based assessments is the creation of products to support project- and problem-based learning . Although project-based assessments are especially well suited for formative purposes, they are also employed in summative settings, such as the generation of capstone projects at the end of a year or course of study. Project-based assessments are often linked to a category called authentic assessments. In an authentic assessment, students are required to demonstrate understanding of concepts and perform skills within the context of that authentic activity, that is, by replicating real-world performances as closely as possible (Svinicki, 2004). Wiggins (1998) lists six characteristics of an authentic assessment: 1. The assessment is realistic; it reflects the way the information or skills would be used in the “real world.” 2. The assessment requires judgment and innovation; it is based on solving unstructured problems that could easily have more than one answer and, as such, requires the learner to make informed choices. 3. The assessment asks the student to “do” the subject, that is, to go through the procedures that are typical to the discipline under study. 4. The assessment is done in situations as similar as possible to the context in which the related skills are performed. 5. The assessment requires the student to demonstrate a wide range of skills that are related to the complex problem, including some that involve judgment. 6. The assessment allows for feedback, practice, and second chances to solve the problem being addressed.
• #20: A popular technology for scoring forced-choice responses is a test scanner. These scanners use the famous “bubble sheets” with which you are undoubtedly familiar. You can create multiple test forms to increase security and a grade scanner can score all forms within a few minutes. Test scanners also allow you to do an item analysis of an assessment to determine whether any items were too easy or too hard, which can help you improve the match between your standards, instruction, and assessment. Rubrics have become popular due to their valuable pedagogical aspects. Rubrics can help you determine the activities and resources needed in your instruction. Since rubrics define the different degrees of exemplary products and performances, they are likely to delineate the critical skills and knowledge necessary for mastery. Rubrics also provide a mechanism for providing detailed feedback to students (Andrade, 2005). They set expectations at the beginning of your lesson so students can better set their own goals for performance. They also provide support for formative self-assessment and peer assessment so that students can receive critical support for determining their levels of performance and either continuing with or selecting different strategies to complete their projects.
• #24: Evaluate and extend: In order to extend your learning, consider how the content in this chapter prepares you for the topics in the next chapter. Students may want to review the ISTE NETS-T and outcomes in the next chapter.