Assessment Strategies for Online Courses

1. Assessment Strategies for Online Courses NMHEAA 2008 DACC Team Nina Javaher Abby Osborne Dr. Ratna PankayatselvanOscar Quintela(facilitator) DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

2. Mission Statement In order to help faculty with assessing student learning outcomes in online classes, we will develop and promote assessment strategies. We will develop guidelines that will help faculty to use learning management tools efficiently to assess student learning outcomes. We will present and promote our assessment strategies through professional development, Distance Learning Training and faculty resources website. DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

3. Assessment Strategies • Rubrics • Concept Maps • Student Portfolios • ConcepTests • Knowledge surveys • Exam/Test/Quiz • Presentations • Calibrated Peer Review • Written reports . DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

4. Rubrics A rubric is a scoring tool that lists the criteria for a piece of work, or “what counts” (for example, purpose, organization, details, voice, and mechanics are often what count in a piece of writing); it also articulates gradations of quality for each criterion, from excellent to poor. The term defies a dictionary definition, but it seems to have established itself, so I continue to use it. DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

5. Concept Maps Concept maps offer a method to represent information visually. Concept maps harness the power of our vision to understand complex information "at-a-glance." The primary function of the brain is to interpret incoming information to make meaning. It is easier for the brain to make meaning when information is presented in visual formats. This is why a picture is worth a thousand words. Practical applications in your courses: • Handy way to take notes during lecture. • Excellent aids to group brainstorming. • Planning your studies and career. • Providing graphics for your presentations and term papers • A way to outline your term papers and presentations. • Refine your creative and critical thinking http://classes.aces.uiuc.edu/ACES100/Mind/Cmap.html DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

6. Student Portfolios Portfolios are collections of student work representing a selection of performance. Portfolios in classrooms today are derived from the visual and performing arts tradition in which they serve to showcase artists' accomplishments and personally favored works. A portfolio may be a folder containing a student's best pieces and the student's evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the pieces. It may also contain one or more works-in-progress that illustrate the creation of a product, such as an essay, evolving through various stages of conception, drafting, and revision. http://www.ed.gov/pubs/OR/ConsumerGuides/classuse.html DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

7. Conceptests ConcepTestsare conceptual multiple-choice questions that were originally designed by Eric Mazur at Harvard University for students in large physics classes (Mazur, 1997 ; NSF, 1996 ). They: • ConcepTestExample Collection • Focus on a single concept • Can't be solved using equations • Have good multiple-choice answers • Are clearly worded • Are of intermediate difficulty • Watch a 2-minute video clip of Eric Mazur using and discussing ConcepTestshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBYrKPoVFwg http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/interactive/conctest.html DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

8. Knowledge Surveys Knowledge surveys are an approach to assessing 1) student preparedness and 2) teaching effectiveness. As described by Nuhfer & Knipp (2003), the surveys consist of numerous questions which exhaustively itemize the content of a course. When students take the surveys, they are not asked to provide the information required by the questions. Rather, they are asked to assess their own confidence level with respect to each question. Levels of confidence might include "I could answer this," "I could find the answer to this in ten minutes," "I could not answer this," and so on. Research findings indicate that student responses to the surveys correlate closely to other assessment indicators, such as tests, that require an actual display of knowledge. http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/knowlsurvey.htm DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

9. Exams/Test/Quiz • Many teachers dislike preparing and grading exams, and most students dread taking them. Yet tests are powerful educational tools that serve at least four functions. • First, tests help you evaluate students and assess whether they are learning what you are expecting them to learn. • Second, well-designed tests serve to motivate and help students structure their academic efforts. Crooks (1988), McKeachie (1986), and Wergin (1988) report that students study in ways that reflect how they think they will be tested. • Third, tests can help you understand how successfully you are presenting the material. • Finally, tests can reinforce learning by providing students with indicators of what topics or skills they have not yet mastered and should concentrate on. http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/quizzes.htm DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

10. Presentations http://www.psychometric-success.com/assessment-centers/assessment-center-presentation-exercise.htm Presentations are often used to assess student learning from individual student or group presentations.. DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

11. Calibrated Peer Review Calibrated Peer Review (CPR)™ is a Web-based program that enables frequent writing assignments even in large classes with limited instructional resources. In fact, CPR can reduce the time an instructor now spends reading and assessing student writing. CPR offers instructors the choice of creating their own writing assignments or using the rapidly expanding assignment library. Although CPR stems from a science-based model, CPR has the exciting feature that it is discipline independent and level independent. CPR funding has been generously provided by the National Science Foundation and by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu/ DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

12. Written Reports Written reports are a classic assessment used by faculty. Written reports may be as short as a one-minute paper and as long as a term paper. • Written Report Scoring Rubrics • Minute Papers • Weekly Reports http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/assess/writtenreports.html DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

13. WebCT Tools • Quizzes/Surveys • Assignments • Discussions • Student Homepages • Student Presentations • Self Test • Chat . DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

14. Quizzes/Surveys Quizzes are texts for which grades are assigned. Grades and statistics can be released to both you and to students. Depending upon the type of questions in a quiz, quizzes can be completely or partially graded by WebCT, marked by an assigned teaching assistant, or by yourself. Note: WebCT is unable to automatically grade paragraph questions. Surveys are anonymous tests for which no grades are assigned, but which provide you with statistics. Survey responses are automatically tabulated, and the results are summarized. Tip: Because the results are anonymous, surveys are ideal for course evaluations or for canvassing opinions on an issue discussed in the course. DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

15. Assignments Assignments allows you to create and distribute course assignments to your students, and download, evaluate, and assign a grade to the completed work. First, add the assignment to the course by Adding an Assignment, then use Assignment Settings to enter the instructions about the assignment, assign a maximum grade to inform the students of the assignment's value, and set the time and dates for which you want the assignment to be available. You can also attach assignment-related files such as photographs, a spreadsheet you want the student to modify, or articles to which you want students to respond. Students can then view the assignment instructions, submit their completed work, and view their grade after you have graded their assignment. DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

16. Discussions Discussions allows you and your students and teaching assistants to engage in online discussions. Discussions is divided into different topic areas which allow you to create discussion forums around particular subjects. Topics can be public or private. Everyone in your course can access public topics, while private topics are available only to the set of students and teaching assistants that you choose. With Discussions, you can: • send and read messages • search messages • compile and download messages • create, delete, or rename a topic • add members to a private topic • lock a topic, making it unavailable DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

17. Student Homepages Student Homepages gives students the tools they need to create a personal web page, which contains information about themselves, the projects they are working on, and links to their favorite web sites. As a designer, you can view and edit a student's homepage. DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

18. Student Presentations Student Presentations allows you to create groups of students within a class and assign them a project that they assemble in their own area of your WebCT course. The groups create their presentation in HTML as linked web pages. You and other students in the course can view the completed project. Projects could be collaborative writing assignments, research proposals, or multimedia Web presentations on particular course topics. You can also assign students to individual student presentations. Student Presentations allows you to: create groups manually. generate groups at random, using the Group Generator. edit groups after you have created them. create a group discussion area. make presentations available to the entire class, the instructor and groups. specify when presentations are available. send mail to each group of students using Mail. view students' completed work. DACC Team NMHEAA 2008

19. Self Test Self Test allows you to create a test consisting of multiple-choice questions that students can use to test their knowledge. No grades are assigned or recorded. Instead, when a student answers a question in a self test, they are informed immediately whether the answer is correct. You can also provide feedback on the answer. You can create a general self test for the course or a self test for a specific content page in the Content Module. Students can access the self test for the course from the Course Menu, and they can access the self test for a content page from the Action Menu. DACC Team NMHEAA 2008