Assessments

Assessments are an integral part of a curriculum. Assessments should test student knowledge and understanding of the concepts presented. They should follow the same formats presented in practice and provide opportunities to show progress in critical thinking skills. Assessments need to be both objective and subjective. Objective assessments allow for proficiency to be measured without a large time commitment for the teacher. Subjective assessments provide opportunities for students to “show” teachers what knowledge they have gleaned from the course and how they can apply that knowledge.

Finding a test generator to produce exam-type assessments in a practical and efficient manner for all CLASS™ courses was very difficult at the time. Equations and math symbols were a particularly tricky problem—especially when trying to cover all platforms and browsers. These and other technical issues will be covered in another section. Here, the topic is design issues related to assessment with some examples from CLASS™ courses.

A test generator was created by Nebraska Educational Telecommunication (NET), which helped standardize our system of creating assessments and feedback. NET put the questions and answers into the test generator. It was rather complicated to use and very time consuming if corrections needed to be made. It was difficult to incorporate graphics into the test generator, and designers had to be doubly accurate in the material they sent to NET since the test generator was so time consuming to change. This sample self-check test is from World Civilizations.

Language and other subjective assessments were a special problem and had to be split into two parts — one for the teacher-graded writing and speaking, and another for the objective computer-graded questions. The teacher-graded assessments were sent using the ‘Notebook’ feature. The student typed their answers directly into the textbox on the screen and then pressed a “send to teacher” button that transmitted the student’s assessment. Special problems with language courses will be discussed with in Technology section.

One major problem with the ‘Notebook’ feature was that all the formatting originally entered into the textbox was lost in transmission. There were no paragraph breaks and no italics, bold, or underline format. This lack of format makes the student’s submissions extremely difficult to grade, since it is hard to know if the students meant to leave the formatting off or if the system removed it. Teachers were forced to double-check a student’s work by accessing each student’s coursework using their individual logins and passwords.

One suggested remedy was that the student’s could add the hypertext markup language (HTML) code for their formatting when they submit their assignments. However, both teachers and designers felt it was unrealistic to expect students to put the HTML code in their assignments before their submit them.) There was also no spell-check feature available to students. As a consequence, students were encouraged to compose their written assignments and assessments in their word processor. This allowed them to check the spelling and grammar, save a copy for future reference, and then copy and past the text into the textboxes in the ‘Notebooks’.

Objective assessments can successfully measure a part of student knowledge. Rarely can they be used alone to fairly measure proficiency. A “challenge” of the assessment process is to balance the subjective assessments, designed to assess critical thinking, writing, and creative skills, with the amount of teacher time that they require for grading. Decisions must be made based on the type of course, the number of students per teacher, financial factors, etc.

What Do I Need To Know?: Assessments