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Mid Course Quiz

Introduction

I have come to associate (or link) certain things, or concepts, together. So, if you have a teacher / lecturer / trainer successfully doing their job of ‘teaching’ then you must also have learners / students / pupils. You can’t have the first without the second. However, I do think that you can have the second without the first, i.e. people can LEARN without there being a teacher around. People learn from experience, from reading books or by watching TV. OK, some might say that the author of the book or programme director is the ‘teacher’ in these cases, but hardly a ‘face-to-face’ teacher in the sense of our current educational system.

Positioned along the spectrum of learning, Open Source learning will tend to the left, along with books and TV … (sorry about this table - it was the only way I could do a diagram, try and ignore the table lines!)

Wherever the learning takes place along this spectrum though, feedback will help the student. If you’re learning from experience for example, at the simplest level, you soon learn not to touch the boiling kettle because of the pain! And feedback on your weekly seminar paper was/is the basis of university learning.

Formative Assessment is assessment that is designed to create Feedback to support learners to improve their subsequent learning.

Formative assessment does not usually contribute to the student’s final grade or result, Summative assessment does contribute to the learner’s grade.

Formative assessment is sometimes referred to as ‘assessment for learning’, which captures the idea that it is not about using particular methods but is about a purpose – about using assessment in order to improve future learning. Formative assessment should provide information, or feedback, that can help modify student performance on similar types of task in the future.

Feedback may come from lecturers, the learning environment software in the form of a Quiz, other students, or from the students themselves through a process of self-evaluation.

The trick is to design activities and systems that will generate feedback that will encourage the student to carry on with their studies and to learn (and not just give up).

Received wisdom is that students who are learning at the ‘formally taught’ end of the spectrum tend not to do tasks unless those tasks count in the final grading. But for students at the ‘learning alone’ end there is not always the ‘grade’ to motivate them.

So formative assessment can be presented as:

1. a pacing device to help them work through a block of study and to make sure they have grasped the salient points
2. a self-diagnosis tool, showing them how much they know and identifying areas that they might want to move on to
3. (possibly) preparation for subsequent summative assessment tasks should the learner decide that ‘a qualification’ is important to them.

So ...

In here you could create a quiz, using a tool of your choice, which would test learners understanding of the course so far.

Feedback from other students – peer-assessment – can be listened to as carefully as feedback from teachers. Peer assessment, group assessment and self-assessment are problematic with summative assessment (issues of trust!) but less problematic when used for formative purposes.

Employers regularly say that they value people who can show skill at self-evaluation, a skill that has to be acquired, often over a programme of learning. Check out this Self-efficacy tool ...

• http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/2313.htm

About

How should we do this? Which tools and measures might be used? Do we want to do it the traditional way, or are there better ways?

Questions

What works well

Activities

Results

What have we learned here?

See also

Techniques used for Interactive Activities and for Computer Games and Simulations also suggest new possibilities for learning. For example, the SimCity™ software provides sophisticated feedback on planning and performance - see ...

• http://magazines.fasfind.com/wwwtools/m/2530.cfm?x=0&rid=2530

Notes and references

Useful readings on the issues of Assessment:

1. Conditions Under Which Assessment Supports Students’ Learning, Graham Gibbs (Oxford University) & Claire Simpson (Open University), Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, Issue 1, 2004-05. http://www.glos.ac.uk/shareddata/dms/2B70988BBCD42A03949CB4F3CB78A516.pdf

2. Issues in the assessment of practice-based professional learning, Mantz Yorke, A Report prepared for the Practice-based Professional Learning CETL at the Open University, November 2005. http://www.open.ac.uk/cetl-workspace/cetlcontent/documents/464428ed4aa20.pdf

3. Assessment for Learning: Beyond the Black Box, Assessment Reform Group, 1999 http://www.aaia.org.uk/pdf/Assessment_for_Learning.pdf

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