Tuesday, July 23, 2013

6.3 Reflection - Technology and Assessments

Formative and summative assessments available online can be quick to take and fun for students, they offer immediate feedback to students progress direct to student and teacher.  Formative level assessments allow the teacher to determine if more direction is needed for progress of entire class or individuals while summative assessments allow students to work together confirming and building understanding and use of the knowledge they have just acquired.  This environment can be accomplished in online and blended learning as opposed to face-to-face where assessments take time to process grades and give feedback to students. Often the time delay puts such a distance between content learned and assessment feedback that students do not question or engage material that was not comprehended well.
The time involved in building online assessments can be cumbersome but is well worth the outcome of immediate feedback to students and ease of collecting grades. Students, parents and teachers reap the benefit of these online assessments. Some curriculum sources are now including online formative assessments that I would strongly suggest taking the time to learn how to implement in your courses.

A challenge addressed in this module was when and where to take an assessment. The biggest questions is the summative assessment that determines a student’s overall understanding and if it is an online test how do we monitor that student for a cheat free environment. I prefer the student being monitored by an unbiased adult for their final exam if it is an individual test. However, I have determined that if a time limit is enforced on an online test that it eliminates the student away from school to use materials to cheat/assist with answers as they will score low because of their lack of understanding. Ifthe final exam is a project evaluation then I am happy to apply rubric to student understanding and effort. 

No comments:

Post a Comment