First reflections - online assessment

My first online assessment has been handed in by students. I would be lying to say that I was entirely relaxed about this as it is the first online assessment of this sort that I have written and administered. I've used online testing models in the past (collections of multiple choice or True/False questions as  a source of formative assessment and student practice) but never summative written assessments that are such high stakes.

The assessment was entirely open book, and I took 2 weeks to prepare the boys for the material, in particular to make sure that they were prepared for the depth of thinking that was required.

The assessment tool was GoogleDocs.

For me it was one heck of a risk. Had I written an assessment that required sufficiently deep thinking to mean that copy and paste would not help? Had I briefed the boys sufficiently on the lack of advantage and the ethical issues with copy and paste anyway?

I haven't marked any of the work yet, so can't comment on so many things, but what I have 'sampled' is the boys' responses to the task. I worried that they would find it easy. No, they all responded without a moment's hesitation. It was hard, they said. They had to think, they said. They found that they got things muddled in their thinking, and at times had to work hard to find clarity in their thinking and therefore in their responses.

The big tests will be:

1. The NZQA moderation - did I get the task right, and will I get the marking right?
2. Did the boys genuinely produce their own work in response to the tasks?

So far so good, now for the week of marking.

Online assessment behaviour & metacognition

I am fascinated watching the online behaviour of boys during their assessment.

The assessment is being completed using the GoogleDocs platform. The task is being completed in an 'open book' environment because it is about the thinking and synthesis, not about knowledge recall (although it obviously requires that knowledge in order to be able to synthesise).

Here's an interesting behaviour: a boy writes a piece of his response, and then uses the 'Comment' function to add a comment or question to the side on what he has just written. When I check, sometimes this is a 'note to self', other times it is a question as yet unresolved in his thinking.

This is the most visible illustration of 'metacognition' that I have observed.

'The Innovator's Mindset'

I thought this was an appropriate follow up to yesterday's blog post about assessment and risk taking:


http://georgecouros.ca/blog/archives/4783


Thanks, Pauline, a nice find!!

GoogleDocs assessment and risktaking

This year it fell to me to set and mark our large Level 2 Economics internal assessment. Normally I've had a colleague do this while I set and mark all of the formative assessment for external standards covered by the course. It seemed like a fair split of workload with which we were both comfortable.

The Level 2 Economics course is arguably a course in logic and philosophy as much as it is about economics. The external standards all count for UE literacy credits in writing which signals very clearly the writing expectations that students must meet.

In writing this year's assessment I decided to change things significantly by assessing online using Google Docs and an assignment format rather than an in class paper based written test. I was prompted in part by observation of colleagues' evolutions of assessment format, and also by our previous Moderation report which suggested that an assignment format might produce better outcomes for the students.

So here am I sitting supervising the boys in class as they work on their assessments. I was very nervous going into the exercise - this is a brand new experience for me, and quite a risk, but risk taking is something that we need much more of in education. My perception of risk is heightened by the fact that I lose some control over the process, that I hand control of more of the process over to the students. That's hard - as teachers most of us are at the very least closet control freaks at heart. However I have put in place a strong positive culture of working and thinking, I have emphasised the need for each boy to produce his own work. We have discussed the implications of using other people's work, both acknowledged and unacknowledged. And I have technical processes at hand to help where I suspect that collusion etc may have occurred. There does come a point at which we need to set our learners free and let them fly. They need to 'show their mettle'.

The intensity, the concentration, the output, are all truly prodigious. As with all of the formative writing that the classes had completed previously, the volume of writing appears to be significantly more than we would have seen in the past on paper. The quality will be judged when I mark the work next week of course.

Twitter discussions

Thanks to good colleague Pauline who found this video for me on one American Professor's use of Twitter in the classroom.