Day: May 15, 2011

I am very glad this part of my assignment is over! Creating a rubric for a course you are proposing, but have never taught, is like trying to pour milk into a an eye drop container with a blind fold on your eyes. I have racked my brain trying to come up with a way to measure blogs that have both summative and formative components in them. I think it takes more than one form of assessment to keep students or learners on track throughout a course. It has been quite a challenge for me.

One of the best things I did this week was meeting with a fellow student, one I consider a friend, and spending time with her discussing the course, this week’s module and ‘big ideas.” I value her judgment, because she has taught and has insights far beyond mine. She likes to tell me how accomplished I am; yet, she is actually projecting some of her competencies on me. I respect her opinions and insights; but, I also think often times we are our own worst critics. I wonder if we’re puzzling out just what genius means.

There was nothing particularly challenging about the module this week; until…I hit the part of designing a rubric around an imaginary course. Trying to convey to students what you want them to achieve, by using a rubric is a high level task and to do it right will take a lot of trial and error. It is challenging, frustrating and will probably never really be finished. Nevertheless, I think rubrics should always be improved upon. I am excited about the thought of using rubrics in my on-line course. I have spent a lot of time refining and thinking about what I really want to teach and why.

Assessment is the building block I had hoped would help me build the course I am designing. Now that I have contemplated the rubric and started creating it, I am wondering if it really will help me teach and assess my learners in the ways I hope to do so. I suppose time will answer those questions for me.

This task has helped me understand why Backward Design makes sense. I think the idea was way beyond its time and will serve instructors and teachers for years to come…or until something even better comes along in the world of education. Having to deal with each step of the design is no small task. Doing it in small chunks seems to prove the point Black and Wiliam made when they said testing small chunks of learning within a week helps the learner do the very tasks we are asking of them and helps keep them in their long term memory for a longer period of time. I am not about to forget anything I learned in this course and the others in the certification program.

This video is a  bit long; nevertheless, I highly recommend watching it.

This week was spent studying rubrics. I think I had a pretty good idea how that was going to work. But, I think it will take quite a bit of teaching to really tailor make them for student learning. One of the things I want to measure is the learner’s ability to think critically and analytically about an ill-structured problem. Assessment helps us do this.

There are many similarities between formative and summative assessment. In our readings authors Black and Wiliam (1998) have stated short tests are far more productive than long comprehensive tests at the end of the course. The following ideas of Black and Wiliam were taken from, The Concept of Formative Assessment written by Carol Boston whose paper was based on experts in the field:   

• Frequent short tests are better than infrequent long ones. 
• New learning should be tested within about a week of first exposure. 
• Be mindful of the quality of test items and work with other teachers and outside sources to collect good ones.

Interestingly, I spent 10 years in the university system of which five were spent as an undergraduate and five as a graduate student. Most of the learning of concepts and “big ideas” were assessed through term finals. It was a horrible way to learn. It took days to go back through all the points and ideas presented in lectures. I did not sleep for three days at a time before finals (without the help of drugs) and crashed for 24 hours after the final was taken.

Since writing, critical thinking and analysis was the main focus of my studies in Political Science, I was groomed from the time I declared a major until the time I left my doctoral studies, to write tomes. These were original pieces on researched hypotheses. My work was torn to pieces by my committees. They were written and re-written for months at a time. Yet, these were the most useful forms of assessment, since I could see the under-developed ideas and where I needed to make changes. Today, however, I would never put students through this rigorous process of formative assessment (however, I will leave that for their editors at some future date). There were no rubrics and there was no way of knowing, besides the tests and the grades on them, whether I was on the right track or not.

I think the only Capstone experience I can think of was my oral tests and final tests and the defense of my papers with my committee members. Today, an on-line portfolio seems like a thing of beauty to me. Not only can the student see their progress weekly by participating in discussions in a variety of Web 2.0 applications and writing their blogs ; but they can use it as a Capstone resume for showcasing their work at the end of their degree and/or for a certification program. Even projects at the end of a course can be Capstone pieces. In the end, the students decide what they want to offer future employers as evidence of their accomplishments.

In thinking about the short-comings of portfolios or Capstone portfolios, I suppose it depends on how well the student learned the necessary and required elements in the course or how good a researcher and writer they are. When I think about on-line portfolios, I tend to see the positive; because each blog is a re-cap of what they have learned or did not learn during the module week. I would require them weekly and doing so would help me assess where they are at.  The perk for the student, is the fact they are handling smaller chunks of information, they can always refer back to if needed. This type of assessment can be both formative and summative. Why, because I would comment on them and let them know what they might have missed, over-looked or just not understood. I particularly like the meta-cognitive blogs we do as part of this course for that reason; it gives us a chance to reflect on our work and how we got to where we are and where we still have to go.

I am giving you an example of my rubric idea. I would modify it for my learners. Since I want them to become excellent researchers and think critically and analytically about current issues, my rubric was taken from the ideas presented by the University of Wisconsin-Stout. I have modified it a bit to fit my thinking and needs.