Rafael's perspectives: Alternative assessment.......

Alternative assessment is a way that takes into account a constructivism approach to see students learning. I designed as an alternative assessment a project titled “Community Analysis”. The main goal is to recognize Multicultural Education and Diversity in the Community that will impact teachers’ educational practices.

 

The project gives students the opportunity to demonstrate their learning in a variety of creative ways. I think that the project allows student to foster disciplinary skills such as written communication, oral communication, debate, information retrieval and research. Besides, they have the opportunity to explore the content domain that is studied in class. The material is hard to understand, because some students for example believe that there is not racism in the educational system.

 

I do not like the binary world where I have to compare one type of evaluation over other. I would say that evaluation no matter which approach should be use to help students in their learning process. The problem is when evaluation becomes a system of oppression itself.

 

 

 

Rafa. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My preference of assessment is traditional over alternative. I prep weekly for 64 students (different levels, subjects, and independent study) and for grading purposes traditional goes much quicker than alternative. However, I do enjoy reading student responses that fall under alternative assessment. 

 

The communication tool I am using is the pbwiki, same tool as for Julz’s class. To be sure I covered the four components (audience, behavior, condition, and degree/criteria), I accessed a site for understanding objectives: http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/EDTEC540/objectives/ObjectivesHome.html. I redid the wording in the assignment, as well, as the rubric numerous times to be sure they tied together. Check out my pbwiki at http://cjsclass.pbwiki.com/   

 Unit 3: Alternative Assessment

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For my alternative assessment for my CS-110 class I am providing a Final Project comprised of a PowerPoint presentation and a reflective paper to enhance the skills that the students just learned (Word 2007 & PowerPoint 2007). I supplied the topic (city) and the students will get to chose the city of their choice. In fact, we discussed the final project topic on the discussion board and this is what the students suggested that would be fun and provide variety within the topic for the final class project. I made up a Final Project Rubric with the 3 levels of achievement and an outline of what was required for the assignment. The rubric was somewhat difficult to make as it was hard to find good examples of this kind of rubric used for software applications. Angie Wolf

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CEL490/590: Assessment & Evaluation Online - Unit 3: Alternative Assessments.

A place to share your lessons learned while creating your alternative assessment tool...  Good information to include would be what you teach, what the activity is  and how you're grading it, what worked, what didn't, and what you'd do differently.  Any other info, such as links to the tool, resources that help you, etc., would be a welcome addition as well.

Well, I chose to use WetPaint as a communication tool for this unit. I teach a special education survey class (SPED 500) online. This is a required course for all SPED majors and an elective course for others. I chose to have my students explore the use of digital storytelling. They are to select a topic related to the field of special education and tell a story using a digital story format. I have created a rubric that is available to them while creating the assignment, and I will use the same rubric to evaluate their project. I chose to have the WetPaint site accessible by invitation only; so, if you are interested in visiting, please let me know, and I will give you access. Even though I created different pages to include: Introduction, Directions, Learning Objectives, Rubric, and Resources, they are not displayed in the menu bar. I had to recreate my rubric because I was unable to import it or copy and paste it into a WetPaint table format. I also have not yet mastered how to upload photos into WetPaint. I will work on this. Once I figured out how to edit pages, I was fine. I do not like all of the advertising and clutter on the site. Next time, I think I may try a different communication tool or go back to Google Docs.

Olive Oil

Unit three - Alternative assessment

I am teaching a sample course now with two general nurses (GN) who are learning perioperative nursing and my plans are to make the course live this summer with new who start within the department.  GN are nurses who can practice as nurses but not taking their test for their licensure.  Perioperative orientation nursing program teachings nurses how to specialize in the operating room and assist with the surgeries.  After completing this assignment I think that this technique of learning will prove to be more usefully for the hands on practice and experience that my nurses need to complete a successful goals and objectives.  I was able to complete each of my objectives, a assignment (lesson) plan for one objective, and grading rubric a lot easier then using the traditional assessment.  I added the alternative assessment to my edu 2.0 site for my test learners, people who I have added to the course to review, and my instructors.  Edu was one of my first choices to use but since then my employer has suggested that I use their web tool called articulate and lately I have been adding to that as well.  Using articulate will allow the learners to access the site from work and home with little or no difficulties.   When researching and writing my alternative assessment, I found this website that provided some information that was useful in writing my assessment assignment.  Here it is and hopefully it will help others.   http://www.funderstanding.com/authentic_assessment.cfm

Conni DeBlieck

Unit 3  CEL 590

Alternative Assessment

I have set up a Wiki page for my SPED 532 class.  The class will use the communication tool  WetPaint for this unit of study. 

 I teach the SPED 532 Introduction to Teaching Students with Visual Impairments online each summer as the beginning course for a new

cohort entering our Visually Impaired Program.  Just recently I attended a conference session where I was introduced to the idea of Digital

Storybooks as a medium of teaching content.  I have set up this unit to have my students explore the use of digital storytelling. They are to

select a topic related to accessibility in their community for persons that are blind or visually impaired and relate this information via

a digital story format. A rubric is available to them as they are creating their storybook.  This same rubric will be used to evaluate their

understanding and presentation of the project.  The WebPaint wiki is available by invitation only, and if you are interested in seeing it just

let me know.  I have the lesson ready to post, but I am still working on mastering more issues with WetPaint.  The pages include the Rubric,

Learning Objectives, Directions, Resources and of course the Introduction.  Each of these pages should be displayed in the menu bar.  When

I first began this unit and found WetPaint, the directions were listed in 3 easy steps, so I thought, how hard that could be.  I am not

ready to give up, so I recreated the Rubric as I couldn’t get it to copy and past.  I have been working with uploading photos into WetPaint.

  Julia gave me a link http://otlo.pbwiki.com/Digital-Storytelling that I have been working in trying to get my set up.

Any ideas or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Elissa and I have been working on the WetPaint together in hopes to set it up for our individual classes.  Thank goodness for the collaboration.

Jackie

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The alternative assessment plan I developed is for the practicum course for this program. I used the reverse method for developing this plan.  Just as some have expressed, it was much easier.  I actually enjoyed this method.  The process used was first to develop the questions for the assessment.  Sure enough, the assignments and readings became logical.  The objectives became clearly visible.  Too much time was spent in previous assignments developing and changing the objectives at every level of the plan.  As for traditional or alternative assessement, I believe it depends on the topic as to which method would be best.  Thanks for all the good tips on plan development!!

The LeatherLady

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Alternative Assessment

The communication tools that I have choosen to work with are google doc and chat through skype. I have created a marketing project that will allow the group of students to do research on a product and create a working ad campaign. They will have to collabarate using skype and google doc's. I have the full instructions linked to the student schedule wiki page. I believe this assignment will be helpful to students pursuing a career in the graphic design field as they will be able to see how and where graphic design is used in the real world. 

Kellie

I am still not clear on this "traditional" vs. "alternate" assessment, since much of what is considered "traditional," e.g., projects, consulting with real-world clients, etc. in engineering education seems to be considered "alternative" here. Nevertheless, here goes.

This semester, as an alternative (see! I used the word!) to modeling exercises that I've used in the past, I asked each student team to develop a concept map of the modeling process. The results were surprising and informative. The bottom line is that the students were completely clueless about modeling systems. I found this surprising because these are graduate engineering students who have been working for some time. Oh well, live and learn.

The upshot is that I need to provide more explicit instruction on modeling in my graduate courses. This was never an issue when I taught undergraduate IE classes because every semester students have at least one course that involves modeling. Thus, while freshmen get such instruction, by the time they are taking upper-division classes, they have the basics down and we focus on higher-level modeling topics. It was also not an issue when teaching grad students at TRAC, because they go through a program that emphasises modeling. However, it is clear now that I cannot assume that, in general, graduate students have had such an indoctrination.  That is, it appears that some engineering disciplines do not emphasize modeling as much as IEs do and that some IE programs do not emphasize modeling as much as we do at NMSU.

The consequence is that I need to re-think the whole modeling issue.

On the plus side, at least one team did collaborate via the Internet using IHMC CMAPtools to interactively develop a shared concept map and they reported it worked very well. Now, I have at my disposal a tool that is accessible to students, suitable to detect a class of issues and, it seems, also provides a way to address those same issues. All I have to do now is figure out a good way to use it.

This is also a career skill for almost all of my students, because the IHMC license permits them to use the software, without charge, in a wide variety of situations.

IHMC CMAPtools website: http://cmap.ihmc.us/

John

My preference of assessment is traditional over alternative.  I prep weekly for 64 students (different levels, subjects, and independent study) and for grading purposes traditional goes much quicker than alternative.  However, I do enjoy reading student responses that fall under alternative assessment. 

The communication tool I am using is the pbwiki, same tool as for Julz’s class.  To be sure I covered the four components (audience, behavior, condition, and degree/criteria), I accessed a site for understanding objectives: http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/EDTEC540/objectives/ObjectivesHome.html.  I redid the wording in the assignment, as well, as the rubric numerous times to be sure they tied together.

Check out my pbwiki at http://cjsclass.pbwiki.com/ 

cj   

 I seem to be in the same boat as John. Much of the discussion about traditional was not on my radar. I don't give tests or quizzes. I use rubrics to grade assess written work. I do realize that some of my rubrics need improvement though. 

I am experimenting with wikis. Right now it is just a place to do peer reviews. I do see some potential for collaborative work in developmental english courses.

Beth

hymenoxys

CJ's Alternative Assessment Experience

Writing the lesson objective took a little time to be sure the four requirements: audience, behavior, conditions, and degree were met.  

 

My biggest challenge was creating the rubric. There is the saying that a little hard work up front saves time in the end. That is definitely true in the case of rubrics. Rubrics are basically a simplified way to grade a complex assignment.

 

I tried to follow suggestions from, “Here’s How to Create a Rubric” http://712educators.about.com/library/howto/htrubric.htm

 

1.      Make a list of what you want the students to accomplish through the assignment.

2.      Organize the list from most important to least important.

3.      Decide on an overall point value for the assignment.

4.      Assign each item on your ranked list a percentage value out of 100 percent.

5.      Multiply your total point value from step 3 by each item's assigned percentage to arrive at the point value for that item.

6.      On a fresh sheet of paper, write the name for each item on your list in order from most to least important. Make sure to leave room in between each category.

7.      Assign specific grading criteria for each main category from step six.

8.      Distribute or display the rubric to the students when explaining the assignment.

9.      Know what your categories will be before making the assignment.

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I thoroughly enjoyed this assignment!!  It was challenging, thought provoking, stimulating, and quite rewarding to see the product.  It’s not a “production model” yet (I need to change it from the “CEL580 version”).  But I think it aligns nicely with my overall course objectives and the lesson objectives. You have probably surmised (correctly) that I am a huge fan of assessments that reflect "leaning-in-real-life."  

You’re invited to a viewing:

The link is: http://reta.nmsu.edu:16080/moodle/course/view.php?id=113

You will be asked to enter an "enrollment key" -- The key is otlc2.

Then, press the "enter¨ key on your keyboard

(WARNING !!! DO NOT CLICK the buttons "Enroll me in this course" or "Login")

The activity is in Unit 1/Lesson 4: Collaborative Project: Water Group.

This Alternate Assessment is a collaborative project based on group lab work that encompasses 3 weeks in the nutrition course.

This group (an example of a number of different learning groups) will create a learning object that demonstrates understanding of the symptoms of water imbalance in the body.  The group will meet at least once in a sync environment – chat or skype – and then work async – a group wiki page – to produce a completed product.

Enjoy!!  Mr. Fran

Alternative Assessments are challenging to create as well as to grade.  The key is to develop a good rubric for grading that the students see before the assignment.  This will help with their understanding of what you expect, as well as your ability to assign a grade for the assessment.

I use rubrics for grading papers and other assignments like case studies frequently.  While I thought I understood rubrics, I had created a checklist for students to use that detailed the components of the the history and physical exam.  It is 4 pages long and has a lot of detail with yes/no columns.  When I used it to grade the assessment, I found myself giving a yes check mark when students were sort of meeting the criteria but not quite.  It wasn't a no but it wasn't really a yes.

In developing the Alternative Assessment for this course, I included the directions and objectives for the assignment.  In the directions for the assignment I had written that the purpose was for the student to conduct a smooth physical assessment and to practice, practice, practice.

With Bethany's feedback I was able to create a holistic rubric that had 3 columns - 1 for smooth without hesitation, 2 for mostly smooth with minimal hesitation and 3 for lots of hesitation.  This made perfect sense but I hadn't thought of it before this assignment (and Bethany's feedback).  I had described what I expected the students to accomplish in the directions but I hadn't taken the next step and developed the rubric criteria.  The list in CJ's posting would have been helpful.

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