ga_course_assessment.htm

February 27, 2002

Assessment and Technology

John Rueter
ESR
rueterj@pdx.edu

Notes for GA class

1. Two main purposes for using technology in assessment

Technology changes the way we communicate.

• What do we want to be able communicate to and our students?
  • my answer - each communication is a transaction
    • quality of the communication is determined by the quality of the student's question, response or answer
• What do we want to assess?
  • start from where they are, what they know (Ausebel)
  • or do we start by correcting their misconceptions (Laurillard)

Technology provides and interface with information.

• structure of the information
  • course design
  • faculty access to that
  • student access
• change the way in which students interact with information (blooms+1)

2. Examples for the use of technology

One example of using email to respond to students

• Students answer a question on a forms page by Monday night
• I respond by Tuesday
  • read questions
  • build responses
    • Excel sheet of named cells, concatenation function
  • mail out using multemail (total of 20 steps using multiple applications)
• Quiz on Wednesday or Thursday.

Three examples of a course that is structured for specific learning objectives and using an assessment interface.

• Each has these components
  • structure
  • learning model
  • technology interface to follow learning
  • which of these should come first?

• Concept maps, scaffolding and causal analysis
• concept map (concept map, 3D concept map, 3D concept map with connections)
• scaffolding
• assessment, problem sets, quiz questions, exam questions (assessment thread)
• collect information on each question for each student
• structure of connections (figure 1)
• interface for students (rhombus)

• Individual skills that build to improve problem solving capabilities
  • many specific learning objectives that get checked off
  • creates a large database
  • faculty interface for entering data (using; Dreamweaver, ftp, Cold Fusion, Access)
  • student interface for tracking their progress (student view)
    • simultaneously an interface for the categorization of the learning objectives (object orientation speak)

• Concepts as nodes that must be visited to build understanding of larger concepts
  • order may be important
  • concepts (table)
  • grammar rules for learning (rules and diagram)
  • different outcomes depending on logic (outcomes)
  • can we use this to understand the structure of misconceptions
    • negative transferance - sigmoidal curves and others

3. My goal is for transparent or persistent assessment

We need to be able to assess once and use that information for multiple purposes.

• classroom action - modification of activities within a class period or before the next class
• guidance for student learning leading to graded work - i.e. quizzes
• course assessment for quality improvement, course development cycle
• programmatic assessment
• view of assessment
  • faculty, bottom-up, persistent
  • administrators, top-down, transparent

4. Summary

Facing two major interrelated challenges

• Faculty development
  • understanding of the structure of information,
  • good learning models that matches those structures and
  • interfaces that allow us to understand and manipulate the information

   

• The interfaces are currently very limiting and weak.
  • Steven Johnson (1997) Interface Culture:
    • we will need a new visual language
    • metaforms - data making sense of other data
    • these metaforms will "prosper at the threshold poins wher ethe signals degenerate into noise"
    • "message evolves faster than the medium"
  • our interfaces are too easy to use, they don't fit the difficulty and complexity of the task
  • example of interfaces that may be required
    • flow diagrams
    • fractal
    • symphonic - disphonic
    • programming studios, visual design, object oriented
    • GIS --> LIS
    • LISERL

Web links to my projects

Presentation for the ARN, February 7, 2001
http://web.pdx.edu/~rueterj/esr_assessment/arn_presentation.htm

Teaching with Structured Information
http://web.pdx.edu/~rueterj/rlw/teaching_structured_info/teaching_with_structured_information.htm

Teaching with Structured Information: Part 2 Example course
http://web.pdx.edu/~rueterj/rlw/teaching_structured_info/part2_experiences.htm

Linking Learning Objectives,Technology and Assessment
http://edtech.clas.pdx.edu/presentations/LLOTA-webbook/toc.htm

Multemail: an automated emailer for assessments and graded assignments
http://web.pdx.edu/~rueterj/rlw/multemail/

Disruptive Innovations and Teaching with Technology
http://web.pdx.edu/~rueterj/rlw/disruptive_innovations.htm

A simulation model for student learning that depends on the structure and sequence of the scaffolding of teaching and learning resources.
http://web.pdx.edu/~rueterj/rlw/complex_learning/draft1.htm