Week 3 Readings
Reflections: Assessment
Assessment
has been a gray area in my courses. For
one thing, the study of History—as opposed to the objective exam civics that
passes for historical study in most secondary schools—calls for high order thinking. For another, objective questions take an
inordinate amount of time to make up and make cheating too tempting.
* How much of the final course grade do you typically
allot to testing? How many tests/exams do you usually require? How can you
avoid creating a “high stakes” environment that may inadvertently set students
up for failure/cheating?
I
use a constellation of brief essay papers, discussions, and essay exams. These challenge the student to describe a
term (who, what, when, where, why), situate events in chains of cause-and-effect,
and account for significance, covering a range of levels.
In a follow-up
paragraph, students are asked to write a personal reaction to the document or
narrative that they have read, and here most seem to find it easy to develop
their ideas or relate an aspect of constitutional history, the American
Revolution, or the China Trade to their own lives. The whole essay is structured to balance student
learning, and student control, in the language of
Hoffman and Lowe (January 2011). In addition, the coursework is structured to
reduce cheating to negligible levels; papers are submitted online and I can
easily Google suspicious phrasings. The
most common challenge that students ask about is keeping their writing to the
one-page suggested length; they are free to write more, and I have seen
seven-page offerings for this one-page assignment.
* What expectations do you have for online
assessments? How do these expectations compare to those you have for
face-to-face assessments? Are you harboring any biases?
When I began online assignments (submitting
papers and exams via email or Canvas), I expected only that this was another
option for students. The benefits have
astonished me. Not only is the quality
of essay-writing far better, but it turns out that digital papers are far
easier to grade (and this I did not anticipate). Furthermore, we can now use the papers as a
jumping-off point for asynchronous online discussion. Biases?
Hmmmmm.
*
What trade-offs do you see between the affordances of auto-scored online
quizzes and project-based assessments? How will you strike the right balance in
your blended learning course?
I would not use an auto-scored quiz, and the
formula I am using seems to offer students an interesting intellectual
challenge.
• How will you implement formal and informal assessments
of learning into your blended learning course? Will these all take place
face-to-face, online, or in a combination?
Overall,
this week’s readings have been the most problematic in thinking about ways of
adapting my courses to a blended format.
The readings on a transfer of learning strategy, emphasizing application
“to something tangible or if it can’t be used in real life,” does not seem
directly relevant to the study of History or, rather, what we study is “real
life,” although in the past. Certainly,
though, it has been true in my courses that “[t]echnology is useful in
simplifying this task of transferring the learning strategy.” In this case, by utilizing Canvas to display
my PowerPoint lectures and historic documents, I do not have to cover as much
material during class time, and my students are not rushed in note-taking,
enabling them to think more about the issues that we are discussing.
What
I had not given much thought to is the argument that “[s]upplying examples to
read as text online or offline proves to be helpful.” Although I generally supply model answers for
the misterm and final essay exams, I do so often as an afterthought and in
response to student requests. Nor had I
considered using Bloom’s taxonomy to inspire alternative design
strategies. As part of my foray into
blended teaching, then, I will be exploring fresh design strategies and
incorporating the tools suggested in the Week 3 readings.
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