Assessment Week 5 – Learning objectives

Learning objectives have varied uses and relevance depending on a number of factors, not the least of which includes the learning discipline. Language arts, and other arts disciplines, have been forced to apply a measured scientific rendering of its learning objectives. Historically, this evolved because all learning was deemed grounded and founded on the relationship of cognitive principles to learning behaviors. It tends to work well at the lowest levels of Bloom’s taxonomy at the earliest stages of learning development — a level and stage somewhat easily measured.

As a child moves to adolescence and adulthood, those individual learning characteristics tend to lose their grouping effectiveness. Essential questions of what are good, truth, and beauty become the key ingredients to the arts. Learning objectives do poorly in grouping each individual’s understanding of good, truth, and beauty because ‘what is quality?’ in these domains is situational and contextual, culturally and tradition biased, highly individualistic and unique to each learner. A quality designation in one objective does not apply or measure up necessarily from one situation to the next. (e.g., five-paragraph essays, pencil drawings, piano recitals, etc.)

Education, being the monolithic institution that it is, often is seduced into thinking that something that works in one situation will work for all. Hence, the value of formal learning objectives in elementary schools is good for all, and should be institutionalized. The work of Howard Gardner, constructivists, Piaget, et. al., and others has clearly illustrated the uniques aspects of learning within the institutionalized holistic framework. Quantitative measurement for qualitative work is always relegated to a high degree of disconnect. The institution still lags in putting this knowledge into practice, application, synthesis, and evaluation. Quality is its own measurement beast that is not so easily snared, pinned down, or quantified as knowledge demonstrated through memory assessments can be. End products, backward design, and other behavior idealism has its place. For now education has made it its showcase, and teachers are stuck with it as their surreal vocational reality. It is a bit like plowing a field in the midst of a three-day cloudburst, but as a farmer friend once told me: “Rain is always a good thing. Even if it becomes a flood and makes a muddy slog of things, when the sun shines, it will have been a good thing.” That may be true for the farmer, but will it be a good metaphor for education? When the sun starts to shine, we will know.

The readings for this week explored the taxonomy of assessment. It was interesting in that it raised the question about the relationship of learning objectives and assessment. While administration and accountability watchdogs favor assessment as a tool to measure something against objectives, learning is an assessment process that is the objective. What formula of ingredients would a good constructivist learning objective possess? What verbs, criteria, and performance adjectives would be most valued?

Assessment Week 4 – Tools of collaboration

This week we worked on a collaborative project that examined and evaluated an assessment tool.  Since I am most interested in self-assessment as a learning to tool, I found myself studying the Diagnostic Digital Portfolio of Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  I invested a fair amount of time trying to understand the conceptual framework to make some application.  This eventually led to a nice page of links for the development of e-learning portfolios. (<http://electronicportfolios.com/ALI/index.html#stage4>)

The project report can be located by clicking the Collaborative Project tab.

“Assessment for Learning” (Edutopia-online, www.glef.org) was an important reading.  It affirmed and verified several key ideas.

1. [P]erformance assessment is an essential companion to project−based learning (1.4)
2. They’re true tests of a student’s abilities and knowledge, linked to standards, and documented so that everyone −− students, parents, and educators −− understands what is being assessed. The “performance” can include a wide range of activities and assignments: from research papers that demonstrate how well students can evaluate sources and articulate an opinion to experiments or problems that enable a teacher to gauge a student’s ability to apply specific math or science knowledge and skills. Some performance assessments consist of individual projects; others require groups of students to work together toward a common goal. But whatever the project or problem, well−crafted performance assessments share a common purpose: to give students the chance to show what they know and can do and to provide teachers with the tools to assess these abilities.  (1.4)
3. “It’s a system based on a number of components, it goes on all year long, and it culminates in certain kinds of tasks that demonstrate what students can do.” (1.5)
4. Performance assessment require students to apply the abstract skills and formulas to real−world settings. (2.5)
5. Completing a project, says Reeder, “is the true test of what you know.” (2.6)

Assessment Week 3 – Service learning and concept maps

The Bonk article “The Perfect e-Storm “ and “Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009” are invaluable resources for any teacher, tech trainer, or student working online.  I was reasonably assured about things as I knew of and about many of them.  But I could not have made such a list to that level of completion, and there are things for me to explore like Wordle, Lectora, Cirip and Yammer, Basecamp, and things like that.  Having some quantity of knowledge reaffirmed is reassuring that one is still a player in/on this field.

During the week I have become intrigued about Service Learning in online venues.  Kevin Schuchmann provided a link about online efforts in service learning, “Promoting service learning via online instruction” by Greg Bennett and Frederick P. Green.  It is a good start for thinking what that concept might look like online.

Speaking of concepts, I have also put a concept map at the top, looking at some aspects of self-assessment.  The Essential Assessment Guide an “The Perfect e-Storm” were a wealth of information to pull some differing aspects together under one roof.  Self-assessment is a key process in developing learner “ownership,” which was a key concept from the previous week.

From these three weeks it is quite easy to trace how a path for learning has been constructed along the way from elements of the weeks preceding it.  An end objective is still not clearly focused, but each week is building toward a clearer vision of something that might not have been planned by another individual before all the activities and discussions began.  It is a good constructivist experience.

Assessment Week 2 – Blogs and Learning

I was labeled a rabble rouser by one of my learning journey partners.  I was pondering the pin-point sureness of objective writing versus the necessity of ambiguity in learning objectives if the initial objective was learning.  I thought that more trying to sort out my own confusion rather than rabble rousing, but I was not the least offended at the designation if it improved my thinking and vision.  It did.  The same person went on to describe a practical application of learners being involved in their own objective writing when it was involved in their own learning.   In the case it was writing, and she described how the objectives were much more targeted, precise, challenging, and difficult than any she would have designed.  But something much more profound emerged.  Ownership.  That was wonder cause for pause.  Ownership’s importance to the dynamics of learning.  It generated some wonderful responses, and I am most grateful for the perspectives that lead to more contemplation and understanding about the learner role of writing learning objectives by simply allowing them to be part of the process.  Ownership is powerful in most situations.  The classroom or face-to-face is no different.  I will be happy to be the rabble that rouses such important and useful thinking.  I thank those thinkers for their very worthy ideas.

A word on Edublogs as an assessment tool.  Just about all the key features of effective assessment is a stretch for most blogs even as an Edublog:

• is learner centered • is relevant • is clear as regards purpose • is based on known objectives and expectations • is authentic and objective • is congruent with instructional or learning objectives • leads to direction and change for the learner • provides information for the learner as regards progress and future behavior • is student centered.

However, the Edublog has wonderful possibilities within the context of self-assessment.  As a self-assessment instrument, it may not embrace all the assessment objects effectively, but it touches most of them as a springboard of reflection for the learner.  Informal engagement may be effective for self-assessment, but a formal attempt to meet learning objectives may lead to artificial and misleading results.  What a self-assessment blog allows is ownership, (see above), for the learner to more actively and consciously engage their learning processes and content.

Such a blog may serve as a skeletal structure for portfolio development and direction, and more importantly, a venue for the portfolio maker to assess that development, direction, and effectiveness through the development of useful blog reflection writing.

Not everything has to be assessed, but many assessment principles can lead and direct a self-learner’s efforts for success.

Assessment Week 1 – Essentials

I spent most of the first week of class assessing AP English Literature Exams in Louisville, Kentucky.  After reading and evaluating essays from 8-5, I would go back to my hotel room, and do my readings and activities for this assessment course.  My hotel roommate saw some irony in my daily routine.  On the last night, after all the readings were done, I indulged in a Louisville Bats baseball game against the Durham Bulls.  Louisville is the Triple-A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds, and Durham is the Triple-A affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays.  The Bats beat the Bulls, 2-0, in a beautifully pitched game by both teams.  I have a number of assessment points for that evaluation if anyone is interested.

Before the ball game, I spent some time reading Essential Learnings Assessing Guide published by the Department of Education in Tasmania, Australia.  I reflect on a few aspects of this longer reading as the conceptual, philosophical grounding for my thinking, working, and applications of this course to teaching.

Firstly, let’s try to get everything into its bottom line, end-of-the-day, nutshell statement. For me it was: The main purpose of assessing is to improve learning. I do not often see that as the main purpose in practice, so I was encouraged that assessment would be brought to its rightful place in the hierarchy of educational bureaucracy.

As an English teacher, I was pleased to see that the elaboration of this concept was built around three little-word prepositions for, as, and of. Assessing through the Tasmanian lens uses a three-prong pitch fork approach.

• Assessing for learning: on-going — to inform the teaching program.
• Assessing as learning: students actively participating in assessing processes.
• Assessing of learning: for reporting to parents and accountability. (8)

For me, assessment only needs two prongs — for and as.  And, ultimately its greatest use is single-pronged in the shiny, sharp spear of as = students actively participating in assessing processes.  If that is a feature of any classroom, good things are happening.  One of the greatest complaints of college/university teachers is that students lack independent, critical thinking skills.  Conscious attention to assessment in this role can go a long way to reduce this malady in promoted high school students.