Assessment in educational settings is commonly divided
into two categories: summative or formative.
Summative assessment is our classic term paper or
cummulative exam, where we determine how well students
have come to understand the content of the course or the
skills we are asking them to acquire. Formative
assessment is feedback on a draft paper or an in-class
quiz. These quizzes can have different functions,
both geared towards allow self-reflection on the
instructional process.
Formative assessments can be used by teachers and faculty
to determine if they are striking the "right note" for the
students. By reflecting on what the students
achieved compared to the goals of the lessons, a teacher
can determine if they can move on to new content or need
to return to cover some material again.
Formative assessment can also be used by students to
determine if they understand well enough to meet their
goals for the class. By reflecting on what they got
right and what they got wrong, or reflecting on the red
marks (or blue or purple) on the draft of the paper, they
can determine if they need to seek extra help, or spend
more effort on homework. Many philosophers and
psychologists of education argue that learning to do this
reflection is key to students development as
self-motivated learners (Brewer 2004; Erhlinger et al.
2008; Hernandez 2012 provide some recent research into the
use and efficacy of formative assessments in adult and
young adult learners).
Generally speaking, formative assessment in higher
education is more often provided through feedback on draft
papers and other written work, which is difficult to
achieve in large lecture settings. Yet we want students to
learn problem solving, which requires practice and
feedback. There are diverse ways to accomplish this,
but without an army of graduate teaching assistants (and
with a serious need for a good nights sleep most nights),
hand-corrected papers were not a possibility for my
100-student non-majors classes.
Instead, I took advantage of the quiz function offered in
both Blackboard and Moodle teaching platforms. These
quizzes included questions that ran the gamut from
straight factual recall to analysis of text and problem
solving. Links below lead to pages that discuss the
structure of the quiz questions and the taxonomy of the
questions in the quiz pool.
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