Archive of ‘evaluation’ category
Formative Assessment
7 Smart, Fast Ways to Do Formative Assessment
Within these methods you’ll find close to 40 tools and tricks for finding out what your students know while they’re still learning.
edutopia.org/article/7-smart-fast-ways-do-formative-assessment
Entry and exit slips
Exit slips can take lots of forms beyond the old-school pencil and scrap paper. Whether you’re assessing at the bottom of Bloom’s taxonomy or the top, you can use tools like Padlet or Poll Everywhere, or measure progress toward attainment or retention of essential content or standards with tools like Google Classroom’s Question tool, Google Forms with Flubaroo, and Edulastic,
Low-stakes quizzes and polls: If you want to find out whether your students really know as much as you think they know, polls and quizzes created with Socrative or Quizlet or in-class games and tools like Quizalize, Kahoot, FlipQuiz, Gimkit, Plickers, and Flippity
Dipsticks: So-called alternative formative assessments are meant to be as easy and quick as checking the oil in your car, so they’re sometimes referred to as dipsticks. These can be things like asking students to:
- write a letter explaining a key idea to a friend,
- draw a sketch to visually represent new knowledge, or
- do a think, pair, share exercise with a partner.
Interview assessments: If you want to dig a little deeper into students’ understanding of content, try discussion-based assessment methods. Casual chats with students in the classroom can help them feel at ease even as you get a sense of what they know, and you may find that five-minute interview assessments
Flipgrid, Explain Everything, or Seesaw
Methods that incorporate art: Consider using visual art or photography or videography as an assessment tool. Whether students draw, create a collage, or sculpt, you may find that the assessment helps them synthesize their learning.
Misconceptions and errors: Sometimes it’s helpful to see if students understand why something is incorrect or why a concept is hard. Ask students to explain the “muddiest point” in the lesson—the place where things got confusing or particularly difficult or where they still lack clarity. Or do a misconception check:
Self-assessment: Don’t forget to consult the experts—the kids. Often you can give your rubric to your student
Administrators feedback on assessment
categories: evaluation, teaching
the comment below that posting:
Margaret Teall: Maybe if they’re experts on assessments. But…are they?
Microcredentials skills gap and accessible education
Micro-credentials: The solution to the skills gap and accessible education
By reformatting existing programs into micro-credentials and certificates, you can market these new programs to employers and bring new learners through your doors.
At the end of 2020, 80% of U.S. employers said they had more difficulty filling job openings due to skills gaps compared to the year before — and the skills gap isn’t going away anytime soon.
In fact, a recent Gartner survey found that 58% of employees need new skills to successfully do their work.
To start offering micro-credential programs:
- Identify gaps: You don’t have to start from scratch to create a micro-credentialing program. Instead, take a proactive approach by comparing the skills offered in your existing courses with the abilities and expertise employers are searching for in their job postings and identify any gaps that micro-credentials can fill for organizations. You can then align the skills offered in your current course offerings with organizations’ needs.
- Create stackable degree programs: You can also make your micro-credentials stackable and build them into a larger qualification (e.g., offer them as degree credits) to entice employees to further their education at your university. This elevates the overall value for learners who may want a degree down the line.
teaching
The Damaging Myth of the Natural Teacher
Despite decades of evidence, good teaching is still considered more art than science. That’s hurting faculty and students alike.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-damaging-myth-of-the-natural-teacher
Even as universities have become more bureaucratic and centrally controlled, teaching continues to operate largely independent of oversight
when she was a college administrator, before becoming a professor, she was expected to spend two to four hours a week on professional development. It was written into her job description. Her training as a faculty member, by contrast, “has all been self directed, self led, things I want to do. It’s never been part of my annual evaluation.”
At most research universities if you were publishing in pedagogy journals they would not be counted or weighted as heavily as if you were publishing in a traditional journal.
Valencia College, a community college in Central Florida that relies heavily on part-time instructors, encourages them to improve their teaching by offering certificates and pay increases for participating in 60 hours of professional development.
Some of the most notable reform efforts are coming from external funders and academic associations. The National Science Foundation, the Association of American Universities, the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, the American Historical Association, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and others have sponsored research and projects on teaching reform, including work on how to advance discipline-based education research.
a pilot program at Kansas to reinvent the evaluation process, as part of a multi-campus project called TEval. The new process, she says, considers seven benchmarks, including course planning, class climate, and evidence of student learning. Teaching reviews consider, for example, how well course content is aligned with the curriculum, whether a faculty member is involved in scholarship about pedagogy, and how much time they spend advising and mentoring students. Departments are also encouraged to develop “peer triads,” in which small groups of faculty members whose coursework is related meet regularly to talk about their teaching and course design.
He and his peers were heavily involved in pedagogical innovation on campus, including the Center for Project Based Learning and discipline-based education research.
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More on teaching in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=teach
peer to peer curation
categories: evaluation
Peer-to-Peer Curation Activities Boost Higher-Order Thinking
https://www.kritik.io/resources/peer-to-peer-curation-activities-boost-higher-order-thinking
Most professors we hear from want to assess their students on higher levels and that if current assessments kept student at the lowest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, they wouldn’t feel rewarded as educators.
However, assessment is by far the most labour-intensive part of teaching. Assessment plans and rubrics must be prepped. Test questions must be written. Every student needs a mark, personalized feedback and a road-map for improvement. The larger the class, the more work for the instructor. Add in formative assessments like weekly assignments and exercises that precipitate subtle, ongoing tweaks to the syllabus and it’s easy to see why many faculty opt to stick with what they know: An accumulation of easy-to-grade summative assessments that almost inevitably rely upon memorization and the most basic understanding of concepts
Curation Activities can be one of the most effective teaching strategies to help students compare what they’re learning in the classroom with real-world examples, and gain insight into how they can relate to each other.
Curation Activities can apply to all disciples, such as Business, Arts, or Sciences.
When students explain what they’ve learned to other students, they help consolidate and strengthen connections to those concepts while simultaneously engaging in active learning Find more project ideas here.
By actively engaging with their classmates and applying their own evaluative skills to feedback they’re delivering to their peers, students are developing lifelong critical thinking and creative analysis skills. Additionally, peer assessment is proven to be effective in getting students faster feedback from diverse sources, increases meta-cognition, independence and self-reflection, and improves student learning. These are all important skills that provide value far beyond the classroom. More details on the benefits of peer assessment here.
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more on curation in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=curation
Microcredentials and Digital Badges in Higher Ed
Microcredentials and Digital Badges in Higher Education
November 27 – 29, 2018 Savannah, GA
https://www.academicimpressions.com/microcredentials-and-digital-badges-in-higher-education
Badging programs are rapidly gaining momentum in higher education – join us to learn how to get your badging efforts off the ground.
Key Considerations: Assessment of Competencies
During this session, you will learn how to ask the right questions and evaluate if badges are a good fit within your unique institutional context, including determining ROI on badging efforts. You’ll also learn how to assess the competencies behind digital badges.
Key Technology Considerations
This session will allow for greater understanding of Open Badges standards, the variety of technology software and platforms, and the portability of badges. We will also explore emerging trends in the digital badging space and discuss campus considerations.
Key Financial Considerations
During this hour, we will take a closer look at answering key financial questions surrounding badges:
- What does the business model look like behind existing institutional badging initiatives?
- Are these money-makers for an institution? Is there revenue potential?
- Where does funding for these efforts come from?
Partnering with Industry
Badging can be a catalyst for partnerships between higher education and industry. In this session, you will have the opportunity to learn more about strategies for collaborating with industry in the development of badges and how badges align with employer expectations.
Branding and Marketing Badges
Now that we have a better idea of the “why” and “what” of badges, how do we market their value to external and internal stakeholders? You’ll see examples of how other institutions are designing and marketing their badges.
Consultation Time
Alongside your peers and our expert instructors, you will have the opportunity to brainstorm ideas, get feedback, ask questions, and get answers.
Next Steps and the Road Ahead: Where Badging in Higher Ed is Going
Most institutions are getting into the badging game, and we’ll talk about the far-reaching considerations in the world of badging. We’ll use this time to engage in forward-thinking and discuss the future of badging and what future trends in badging might be.
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more on microcredentialing in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredentialing
grading for art faculty
categories: evaluation, teaching
Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts
Natasha Haugnes, Hoag Holmgren, and Martin Springborg
https://wvupressonline.com/node/759#2
Martin’s own LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/activity:6425014893287657472/
College and university faculty in the arts (visual, studio, language, music, design, and others) regularly grade and assess undergraduate student work but often with little guidance or support. As a result, many arts faculty, especially new faculty, adjunct faculty, and graduate student instructors, feel bewildered and must “reinvent the wheel” when grappling with the challenges and responsibilities of grading and assessing student work.
Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts enables faculty to create and implement effective assessment methodologies—research based and field tested—in traditional and online classrooms. In doing so, the book reveals how the daunting challenges of grading in the arts can be turned into opportunities for deeper student learning, increased student engagement, and an enlivened pedagogy.
Exemplary Course Program Rubric
Exemplary Course Program Rubric
http://www.blackboard.com/resources/catalyst-awards
if problems with the link above, try this one:
/bb_exemplary_course_rubric_apr2017.pdf
Course Design
Course Design addresses elements of instructional design. For the purpose of this rubric, course design includes such elements as structure of the course, learning objectives, organization of content, and instructional strategies.
Interaction and Collaboration
Interaction denotes communication between and among learners and instructors, synchronously or asynchronously. Collaboration is a subset of interaction and refers specifically to those activities in which groups are working interdependently toward a shared result. This differs from group activities that can be completed by students working independently of one another and then combining the results, much as one would when assembling a jigsaw puzzle with parts of the puzzle worked out separately then assembled together. A learning community is defined here as the sense of belonging to a group, rather than each student perceiving himself/herself studying independently.
Assessment
Assessment focuses on instructional activities designed to measure progress toward learning outcomes, provide feedback to students and instructors, and/or enable grading or evaluation. This section addresses the quality and type of student assessments within the course.
Learner Support
Learner Support addresses the support resources made available to students taking the course. Such resources may be accessible within or external to the course environment. Learner support resources address a variety of student services.
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more on online teaching in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+teaching
more on rubrics in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=rubric
student evals online courses
categories: distance learning, distributive learning, e-learning, evaluation, hybrid learning, mobile learning
Discussion on the EDUCAUSE Blended and Online Learning Group’s listserv
Question:
develop anonymous mid-course student evaluations allowing students to reflect on course and progress and informing instructor about what is working or not in the course.
Answers:
– what is working well for you in the course?
– what is not working well for you in the course?
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- What is helping you learn?
- What is hindering your learning?
- What suggestions do you have to make the course better for you, your peers, or the instructor?
Katie Linder Research Director Extended Campus, Oregon State University 4943 The Valley Library Corvallis, Oregon 97331 Phone 541-737-4629 | Fax 541-737-2734 Email: kathryn.linder@oregonstate.edu
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At the University of Illinois, we have been using Informal Early Feedback as a way to gauge information from our students to help improve the courses before the end. Here are a couple of links to our site. The first is the main page on what IEF is and the second is the question bank we offer to faculty. This is a starting point for them, then we meet with those who want to work on tweaking them for their specific needs.
* About IEF: https://citl.illinois.edu/citl-101/measurement-evaluation/teaching-evaluation/ief
* Question Bank: https://citl.illinois.edu/citl-101/measurement-evaluation/teaching-evaluation/ief/ief-question-bank
If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to ask.
Sol Roberts-Lieb Associate Director, Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning Pedagogy Strategy Team and Industry Liaison UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
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more on student evaluations in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=student+evaluation