3/11: Assessment and Evaluation in the 21st century by Konrad Glogowski

"Assessment is the tail that wags the curriculum dog" - if we want to see reform in curriculum we need to address making changes in how we assess and evaluate our students. Rather than perpetuating the traditional classroom where the student is given the time to complete a task by the teacher; the teacher evaluates the student's work; assigns a grade and the process stops - it is time to move to a new paradign of assessing in the 21st century classroom. This paradign sees the student as an independent researcher that engages an idea or topic; then interacts with others online is a chat format - a community- for additional information; which leads to a conversational assessment. The problem becomes how to evaluate the very 21st century skills that we value in education. Traditionally students learned by acquisition of knowledge. Today, in addition, our students need to learn by both participation or cooperative learning and knowledge creation (giving students the opportunity to build their knowledge). The latter helps build discerning learners and falls within the sociocultural paradign of assessment. The model for the future enables our students to grow up as competent learners that have a sense of place, good communicators, having a sense of belonging and making meaningful contributions to society. To properly assess students for learning, we the educators must consider the following criteria - timely and meaningful feedback, allow students self-assessment (give students the opportunities to look and ask questions about their work), and revisit episodes of competence, not incompetence. This creates an environment where conversations on learning can take place between the student and the teacher. It makes learning visible and deepens the understanding of both the teacher and the student. "Students learn when the see that their teachers, family, and peers see value in their work and what they do has meaning." So what is meaningful feedback for a student. Good feedback is more effective when it focuses and provides information on the correct or expected response. Its goal is to fill the gap between what is understood and is to be understood. In addition, good feedback builds on changes from the student's previous work. Good feedback addresses three primary questions for the student, namely, where am I going, how am I going to get there, and where do I go next. Unfortunately, 99% of teachers offer offer task-level or self-level feedback due to constraints in time and work overload. Dr. Glogowski points out their are four levels of feedback. The 1st level is called the "task level" which is a simple notation on student's work to indicate competion of a task. I tend to use this approach for grading HW. I use a check plus for superior work, a check for average work, and a check minus for limited work. The second level is called "self-level" and is a positive, personal evaluation such as "work well done" - again something I use on papers but I do elaborate more guided feedback. This brings us to level three called "self regulation" - this mode helps students become autonomous - it provides guided feedback to help make students independent learners. The final or fourth level is the "process level" where the feedback focuses more on the student's understanding of the processes needed to accomplish the task. Organization of the processes is also reviewed.
Where it often becomes difficult to assess performance is in
the arena of blogging. To help students understand the strength of their blogs, their written
blogs are graphed on a graph where the y-axis represents the frequency of posts and the xaxis
the personal investment of the writer. An addicted blogger - someone who writes about
everything with no merit, for example, would have a high y -value but a low x-value. The
best contributor would exhibit both a high x and y-value. A high contributor would have a
high ripple effect - in another words, would command highly respected responses. The
students would plot their position on the graph based on their self-evaluation. In evaluating
students' blogs four categories are considered as recommended by Dr. Glogowski:
1. Evidence of Data Gatheiring
2. Evidence of Understanding
3. Evidence of Reflection/Analysis
4. Evidence of Creativity
The creative and discerning thinker would obtain high scores on reflection and analysis.
Writing in your own words leads to high performance in understanding and finally,
discussion of the topic at hand with a different media such as a podcast which presents the
student's own take on the material would score high in creativity. The question asked is
"does this blog entry have a ripple effect in the community? The session ended with one
final question posed to the attendees, namely, "how do we make the sociocultural approach
work so we do not feel guity about giving grades?".