Assessment Musings In the past few weeks our team has been asked to review assessments (mostly quizzes and tests) with an eye to clarity and fairness. Instructors were worried about question phrasing, multiple choice construction, weightings, time limits among other things. It was wonderful work and we learned much from working with our colleagues across the faculties.
In our interactions with individual instructors, we also discovered that sometimes the assessment is superficial and has only a tenuous link to the course outcomes. Sometimes it is because the instructor has been put into an awkward circumstance; they were handed a course and they are just trying to make a go of it (And might not get that course ever again!). Previous instructors made the text their curriculum and adopted it as “the source of truth”. The result is many “legacy” assessments that merely ask students to recall information. But, “List the four different kinds of organizational structure that the author identifies in the text” is not a great question. Questions like that reward “rightness” rather than comprehension. I’ll give you an example. Years ago, I was visiting a Social Studies class where students had been asked to work with terms associated with the Industrial Revolution. They were given a list of terms on one side of a page and a flowchart on the other, asking them to place the term where it might seem best. I sidled up to one student and asked him how it was going. He said “fine”, as he copied out definitions from the back of the textbook onto the paper he was given. I decided to find out “just how fine it was” going by giving him a quick quiz. I pointed to his paper and asked him to explain what capitalism was. “It is an economic system, based upon supply and demand whereby an entrepreneur controls the means of production.” He shared. “Aha”, said I, “So what is an economic system and what is an entrepreneur?” “Well, it’s got something to do with money. Not sure who this entrepreneur guy is either, but he controls the means of production!” He shrugged. I won’t bother you with the rest of the conversation. Suffice it to say, that student had a very superficial understanding of many of the terms on his sheet. However, if his instructor gave the student a short answer test asking him to define capitalism and a few other terms, he might attain full marks, if he had managed to memorize these definitions. And the instructor might be happy with this; a short answer/recall type of test would be easy to mark, provide full set of class marks and reward those students who spent time in studying (memorizing). But did real learning actually happen? I’m not so sure. That’s why our assessments should align with course GLOs and SLOs (general and specific learning outcomes). These outcomes have been crafted with an eye to essential understandings and skill development that we need to focus on in our teaching and assessment. Readings and resources, video clips and teacher lectures are used to reinforce these outcomes and not to replace them. So, our challenge is in designing assessments that truly assess the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that our students need, and that can be hard work. Related article: A Table of Contents is not a Curriculum
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AuthorJeff Kuntz Ph.D. ImagesExcept where indicated, images used in the blog posts are personal photos, images from NorQuest College or images from Pixabay. Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright free images, videos and music. https://pixabay.com/ Archives
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