Week 3

Formative Assessment & Feedback

Objectives:

Participants will be guided through key tools and techniques, and will be encouraged to partake in practical and collaborative activity. This week is focused on assessment and feedback.

This week, we will be covering the following:

Creating online quizzes
Creating polls using Twitter
Understanding how to avoid plagiarism
Creating badges and understanding what they are
Peer review and rubrics

The final peer review assignment this week asks you to use a screencasting tool that we learnt about in week 1 to walk through your course and reflect on your learning during the three weeks.

Assessment & Feedback

Assessment is considered one of the most important goals in a student's learning journey. It provides both the teacher and the student with the opportunity to realise how well they have understood what they have learned. The Conversational Framework makes it clear that unless students have the opportunity to produce an output for the teacher to assess, whether or not it is graded, the teacher will not be in a position to know whether learning has taken place. For students, the prospect of grades and feedback can be a very motivating incentive for learning.

Feedback is the process by which the student receives detailed information about their submitted assessment. Assessment and Feedback processes have been widely explored over the last few years, including the ways technology can play an important role to support them -- for example, by facilitating automated and peer assessment.

Rubric is another term that you will encounter this week. Rubrics provide teachers with a framework for assessing pieces of work in a standardised manner based on a set of criteria. They also enable students to fully understand what is expected of them in completing a specific task. While rubrics can be used by both teachers and students, they are essential for orchestrating peer review.

We will be exploring rubrics in an online setting later this week. For background, you might like to visit this webpage: http://edtechteacher.org/assessment/

Summative assessment is the type of assessment most people are aware of: this refers to the assessment that happens usually at the end of a term of learning and carries with it a score or mark. Summative assessment is designed to evaluate student performance.

Formative assessment is used to monitor student learning, give feedback and also to provide information that might lead to adjustments in teaching. Feedback is usually qualitative rather than scores or marks.

Why use Online Assessment and Feedback?

Online formative assessment enables students to engage with their learning at a time and place that suits them, where they can work at their own pace. It provides them with the control to test their own knowledge, assess their understanding and consolidate their learning. There is a wide variety of question types that can be used in online assessments, although Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) and short answers are most commonly used. The assessments can be rich in content and can include multimedia elements such as images, video, sound, documents and web links. Instant feedback supports the learning process, allowing students to identify their strengths and weaknesses, and helping to highlight any gaps in their understanding. Personalised and contextualised feedback can be provided with tools like screencasting and podcasting. We will practice this in a self-review of your learning for the final assignment this week.

Peer-Review Stages

The Phases of of Peer Review (video)

Set up & creating the rubric
Submission of assignments
Allocation of reviewers
Peer Review & Feedback
Grading

Rubrics for Peer Review

The first phase of the peer review process involves supporting learners to provide constructive reviews by providing a rubric.

A rubric is a criteria-based marking scheme where each criterion is shown alongside a description of what is required to meet a specified set of standards. This enables the learner to know what they should do to meet the criteria, and the reviewer to know whether the work demonstrates that the learner has met the criteria and at what level.

There are, therefore, three important parts to the rubric:

evaluation criteria - indicators or guidelines for an assessor to consider
quality definitions - how to distinguish between good, fair and poor responses
a scoring strategy - a scale for interpreting the judgment made by reviewer and allocating a grade

Rubrics are presented in a grid format, like this:

While rubrics can help grade work, many authors such as Reddy & Andrade (2010) think they serve a greater purpose:

"Used as part of a student‐centered approach to assessment, rubrics have the potential to help students understand the targets for their learning and the standards of quality for a particular assignment, as well as make dependable judgments about their own work that can inform revision and improvement".

The free tool for teachers, rubistar, will help you view rubrics created by other teachers and create your own.

There are also templates as Word docs available to download from https://www.template.net/business/word-templates/rubric-template/