November 18 2006

Tip 28: Designing Assessments and Tasks that Matter to the Learners!

Many of you are in the last half of a term -- that part of the class that generally requires students to do more intensive individual and collaborative projects.

The last ecoaching tip -- two weeks ago -- suggested a rubric for analyzing critical thinking. I hope that the examples of student responses showing "emerging" or mastering" thinking were helpful to you, particularly in evaluating the more significant postings and projects that students are working on now.

This tip continues the focus on designing and implementing effective assessment in your courses. In particular I am going to share two assessment ideas from a workshop that I attended at the 12th Annual Conference on Asynchronous Learning in Orlando in early November. The workshop was titled -- How to Know What Your Students Know -- and was co-facilitated by two researchers in online learning -- David Gibson, Co-director of simSchool at the Vermont Institutes and project director of "The Global Challenge <http://www.globalchallengeaward.org/> and Karen Swan from Kent State University.

The first idea describes the process of designing assessment in three steps. The second idea suggests more thought in designing the "task model" for learner projects and experiences.

As you are well aware, part of the planning for an online course is developing the Assessment Plan. This plan is a summary of how the learning outcomes of each learner will be evaluated during a course. Assessment plans generally have at least four (4) types of experiences that "count" toward evaluation. Here are common types of experience

• Participation in discussion posts -- the class conversation
• Successful completion of quizzes within Blackboard
• Individual projects that include analysis, such as critical thinking, and communication of that work with a project of some type
• Team projects of various sizes and purposes
• Tests

A Three (3) Step Process to Guide the Assessment Plan

Here is the three-step process for planning your assessment. (McTighe & Wiggins, 1999.)

1. Identify results that you want for your learners. These results will probably include "enduring understanding" (similar to concepts), knowing the vocabulary and syntax of a discipline domain and being familiar with the "exemplars of a discipline." The exemplars of a discipline might include the most famous representatives and case studies, etc.
2. Determine the "acceptance evidence" by which the learners can demonstrate their knowledge, understanding and integration of ideas.
3. Design the learning experiences to ensure learner accomplishment of these understandings and the processes for demonstrating their learning.

This three-step process can guide us all in the development of an assessment plan that reassures us that we are focusing on fundamental and core concepts.

How Important is the Task Model?

Balanced design also suggests that we design in space for personalized and customized knowledge for students. In the second half of the workshop, David Gibson described an ongoing NSF-funded project called "The Global Challenge." This project -- while actually designed for high-schoolers -- is designed around a fundamentally subtle, but profound shift in assessment. In 'normal" classes we use a process similar to the three step process above, developing guidelines and directions for the projects and experiences that learners will use to demonstrate the discipline performance goals for competency. By contrast, the Global Challenge describes for learners the required features and characteristics of the response -- the Task Model -- but leaves the processes, tools and unspecified.

How is that different? I suspect that this difference cycles us back closer to the model of apprenticeship. We the faculty very likely "overdesign" our course projects, consistent with our role of "directing learning" assigning projects that match our knowledge structure and our favorite tools and concepts.

The Global Challenge project focuses the work of the teacher-mentors on designing a Task Model for students that enables and encourages wide-ranging discovery, teamwork, analysis and global awareness. It is a project in which learners are not assigned to solve a problem for which we have known answers and ready responses; but a project that is of social, economic and global significance for which we need innovative, creative thinking.

In other words, students are given the raw materials for the project, but as a team of three -- two highschoolers and an advisor -- collaborate with international counterparts from October to May to address global climate change.

So, in summary, three key features recommend themselves to our assessment practices -- (1) Do not overdesign a project, and (2) Focus on problems that need innovative ideas and solutions (3) Enable work on projects that students like and want to do, rather than projects that are important to faculty.

I think a graphic here might be good to help communicate this idea, but I don't have one handy!

Enjoy the Thanksgiving Holiday!

Notes and References

judith@designingforlearning.org
Revised February 11, 2010
Copyright Judith V. Boettcher, 1997-2010