Assess the Essence

(and a second session from the 5.25 inservice)

With the move to get rid of “traditional exams” or “final tests,” there has been an exodus to “projects,” which term seems to mean many different things to many different people.  Final exams or papers are often meant to be comprehensive (either in terms of content or skills), but designing an exercise that sums up an entire course is a non-trivial exercise for most of us.

Projects can easily go astray if they are not carefully designed.  Requiring collaboration outside of class can be difficult for families where the kids don’t yet drive; disallowing collaboration can be difficult to enforce.  Sometimes teachers have a good idea but a less-than-ideal implementation.  Sometimes, we can get lost in the forest by focusing too much on the trees.  And sometimes, to continue the metaphor, we can stay on a well-worn path and miss the beauty of the larger woods around us.

It’s easier to come up with a good “culminating experience” (as a former headmaster at St. John’s once called non-traditional assessments at the end of a term) if we can answer the following questions:

  • What was the point of this course?
  • What skills were emphasized over the period of the course?
  • Is there any content that is critical for the student to retain?
  • If you interviewed a student in two years, what would you want her to remember from the course?
  • If your students took the “final assessment” next August instead of in May, what would they be able to do on it?

Maybe start with your department’s lodestone (if it has one).  (Some possible core ideas for several areas of study are jotted down on the back though your department may not completely agree or use different language to express the ideas.)

If you believe that “learning how to learn” is an important part of the value students get from your course, have you considered assessing “learning” rather than “having learned”?  How is that different?  Don’t we normally equate “what you’ve learned” with “how well you learn”?  Should we?

In each case, too, lurking in the background of the practitioners of the art (or in the minds of those who fund them) is the bigger question of “To what end?”  Neither funders nor practitioners agree on the answer to this question, so you need to be explicit in presenting different possible answers to your students.

 

Maybe some questions

  • To what extent should a “final assessment” be comprehensive?
  • Where should the balance of skills and knowledge lie?
  • The good–and the bad–of rubrics
  • Balance of merit of assessment with ease of grading

 

 

 

 

 

Scientists learn how to ask answerable questions (they’re called “falsifiable hypotheses” in science), then design ways to answer the questions (they’re usually called “experiments”) , and then present their answers in a way that’s persuasive to the intended audience (that usually requires background context, “data analysis” as part of a written article, and tie-ins to a broader context and steps for future work.)  Someone who “does science” for a living will not be impressed by work that doesn’t meet these basic conditions.

Mathematicians learn how to think deeply about very abstract questions, to approach the same question from multiple perspectives, and to prove their conjectures to their intended audience.    A step on the road to such mathematics is to be able to derive a result someone has presented you from basic principles.  Or to take an idea from one area and apply it to another one.

Historians learn how to construct a narrative from various documents/artifacts and to look at several different possible interpretations of such sources and their implications.  As a result, they can show how the contemporary United States might interpret (say) the Crusades one way, but people living near the Eastern end of the Mediterranean very differently. They may disagree both on “what happened” and “what we should do about it now.”

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