Thoughts on Assessment

For me, assessment is the most difficult and least enjoyable part of being an educator. I have been on the receiving end of assessments that I felt were too critical and others that I felt were not critical enough. The one occasion when I taught college, I felt most uncertain about how to assess performance and assign grades. Now, sixteen months of grad school later, assessment is still not my favorite subject, but I am becoming less uncertain about my own feelings.

For one thing, I believe in the value of the traditional test, a relic from the reign of behaviorism, as well as reflective writing, the primary tool of modern constructivists. I feel no compulsion to pledge allegiance to one theory of learning over another. And why should I? I have found valuable insights in behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism, and connectivism. Metaphorically, I think of each theory as a door offering a different view onto the complex phenomenon of learning. Teachers in the trenches seldom commit to a particular ism, either, preferring instead to cherry pick the best ideas they can find to help their students, leaving behind what doesn’t work.

What works and doesn’t work in assessment
The view of assessment offered by constructivists Palloff & Pratt (2006) is perfect for cherry picking. They put forth a number of practical and common sense prescriptions for assessment in online courses, such as:

1. Use assessment techniques that fit the context and align with the learning objectives (p. 1); and
2. Design assessments that are clear, easy to understand and that are likely to work in the online environment (p. 1).

Yet some of their other prescriptions seem to intensify negative social influences on learning and abdicate assessment responsibility. These are best left behind:

1. Include collaborative assessments through public posting of papers along with comments from student to student (p. 1); and
2. Ask for and incorporate student input into how assessment should be conducted (p. 1).

Constructivism challenged
In my opinion, students of all ages need strong guidance from their teachers in both the learning and assessment phases if they are to achieve individual excellence. But constructivism pushes the guide off to the side, recasts him or her as a learning peer, and promotes the group to the role of primary facilitator of learning, changing the goal of individual excellence to the goal of being a good team player.

I’m not the only one who believes minimizing guidance is a mistake. Kirschner, Sweller & Clark (2006) report, “The past half-century of empirical research on this issue has produced unambiguous evidence that minimal guidance during instruction is significantly less effective and efficient than guidance specifically designed to support the cognitive processing necessary for learning” (p. 76). In other words, there is evidence now that constructing meaning for one’s self is not the best way to learn. It follows that assessment methods flowing from that same faulty assumption should also be abandoned.

References

Kirschner, P.A., Sweller, J. & Clark, R.E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during
instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75-86. Retrieved from http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/publications/kirschner_Sweller_Clark.pdf

Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2006). How do we know they know? Student assessment
online. 22nd Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning. Retrieved from http://csuglobal.blackboard.com/bbcswebdav/library/Article%20Reserve/ OTL541/How%20do%20we%20know%20they%20know.pdf