Lynette's Education Photo-Blog

The readings this week coincided with topics timely to issues we are dealing with at work.

The Assessment and Online Teaching article discussed the importance of authentic assessment that is integrated with learning processes and real-life performance. It also discussed the need to authenticate the work of students in an online environment, and concerns about plagiarism and how to address it. It is clear that the more authentic an assessment is, and the more it grows out of a natural extension of the class work and discussion, the less likely it is that someone could pluck something off the Internet and have it be relevant to the class assignment.  In our work with school districts on balancing the use of different assessments for different purposes – formative classroom strategies, benchmark and diagnostic assessment, and summative/standardized assessment – we highlight the importance of using authentic assessment in a classroom environment to capture essential learnings. Whether a traditional or online class, assessment that parallels how the knowledge will be used in real-life settings is a better demonstration of student learning than only using traditional “test” methods.

The Roberta Furger article, Assessment for Understanding, discussed the importance of performance assessments that involve students in their own learning – that can both provide meaningful feedback to the student, as well as serve as a mechanism for assigning grades. Sometimes that first purpose is forgotten, and the emphasis is too much on the grading alone. The article discussed the New York performance assessment project that worked with Linda Darling-Hammond from Stanford. Right now, states across the country are beginning to form consortia to work collaboratively on next-generation assessments. We have been in conversation with Linda Darling-Hammond about her ideas for integrating performance assessment tasks with more traditional standardized tests, and learning from some of the assessment systems used in other nations that do combine the two approaches. It’s an interesting time, with states discussing common core standards that many states will adopt, allowing us to also collaborate on multi-state assessment strategies. We have a rare opportunity to tap into a $350M grant for consortia to develop more innovative state assessment systems, as part of the Race to the Top funding, and it is driving some really good discussion about how to build systems of assessment that are more authentic, and more useful to parents, students, and educators.

I enjoyed the discussion about ePortfolios as a way to have students record performance assessments over time and build a portfolio of their learning. Some of Wisconsin’s universities require their education students to develop an electronic portfolio – which is a great idea – yet people have told me that nobody at a job interview ever asked about or even wanted to see it when it was offered. It seems that if we are going to encourage ePortfolios as demonstrations of cumulative learning, we need to be sure that others are using and valuing them – either employers, or colleges. Until we change the culture, we really are not building a case for the value of those portfolios.

I can see parallels between these articles (authentic assessment, building a portfolio of tools) and the work we are doing in this class. That’s encouraging, that we are modeling what we say is important!

Tags: assessment, authentic, class, elearning, ePortfolio, performance, student, technology, toolkit