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2022-10-02

Last updated Nov 30, 2023

# Principles and Methods of Teaching

#education #teaching #EDUC130

# Aligning Assessments

# Providing evidence

In this 3rd part, we’ll transition to the next phase of the backward design process: aligning assessments. Although there is much to be said and learned about assessment design, in this course, we will limit ourselves to the bare minimum and will focus on understanding the different types of assessments and how they can be more closely aligned with your learning objectives. As imagery, we will refer to assessments as “evidences of learning” 🔍, and refer to the saying

After all, as we learned in Hirst, learning will always be the goal of good teaching. ==What are different types of evidence that we can have students produce? What are the opportunities and limitations of each type of assessment?==

# Why assess?

 When we talk about assessments in education, there are usually three main purposes: ==Diagnostic, Formative and Summative.== For the purpose of this course, we will on summative assessments, but it would be good for you to know the difference among these three.

# Designing Authentic Assessments

# Module

Now that we have some sense of the purpose of coming up with assessments, let’s jump right into the design process. As each step is presented below, I invite you to simulate it with the lesson you are designing.

  1. 🎯 STEP 1: Retrieve your ==learning objectives== - _What is the “change” you want to see?
    1. Well written learning objectives make it easier for you to actually come up with the assessment for it. Sometimes the objectives themselves begin to describe the actual assessment to be done.
    2. For example, in my media and technology course, one of my learning objectives are as follows: “Students should be able to curate and create media (behavior) to aid in teaching a particular subject matter (condition), abiding by instructional design principles (criterion)” - in this case, the main task for my actual assessment is already my learning objective.
    3. If your learning objectives currently do not “spell out” what the assessment will be like yet, that’s okay! We’ll do that in STEP 2.
  2. 🖼️  STEP 2: Choose the ==form== - How can I “see” the learning objective? What is the most appropriate evidence that students can produce in their context?
    1. After reviewing your objective, the next step is to envision it being attained in the context of your learner. This is where the level of your learning objective comes into play-remember Blooms Taxonomy?
    2. ASSESSING HIGHER LEVEL OBJECTIVES through AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENTS
      1. If your learning objective is stated on the higher levels (ex. analyze, evaluate, create), you will probably want to design authentic assessments. ==Authentic assessments approximate the application of the knowledge/skills you want students to attain and use in a real-life context.== When you look at the verbs under these higher order learning objectives, they describe activities that involve more complex thinking, a mix of skills and decision making. It usually involves the creation of a product, the conduct of a performance, or a set of justified decisions that students will need to make given a realistic situation/scenario.
      2. Assessing What Matters Most: Developing Authentic Performance Tasks
        1. Apply and use in meaningful ways
        2. Teachnig is like coachnig
        3. Work to improve
        4. Teachers as coaches
        5. Teaching for understanding and transfer
      3. The tricky part is what we identify as “authentic” - and ==the answer to this cannot be removed from the context of your students.== What might be an authentic scenario for a college student might be different for a grade school student (you actually already started to think about this - remember our previous exercise where I asked you to think about the long-term goal for your subject?).
      4. One of my favorite examples to illustrate this is the TV show Masterchef! What makes Masterchef authentic?
        1. Apart from them really doing the actual cooking, and not just participating in a quiz bee about cooking, the challenges presented call for an application of their cooking skills in realistic scenarios - and one characteristic of a realistic scenario is that it’s “Messy” - it can be sometimes unpredictable, there is no one right answer, and it often involves more complex decision making. These are the same ingredientes (pun intended) that make up an authentic assessment.
        2. Let’s use another example - let’s say you are teaching basic addition to a grade 1 student. It’s great if students can count aloud from 1-20 and could answer a number of drills you throw at them, but wouldn’t it be more authentic if they could actually use their math skills to help their parents compute the grocery, or to figure out how to save up for a toy that they want to buy?
    3. Authentic assessments aim for APPLICATION NOW not just APPLICATION LATER.
      1. I remember asking a few teachers before about why we needed to learn what they were asking us to learn about, and more often than not the answer I got was “you’ll use it in the future!” For a grade school kid, “you’ll use it it in the future” did not sound like a compelling reason to study the subject matter - but just the same, I studied to get an A on a test, and to just forget it immediately after. Is this an experience you can relate to as well? If your answer is yes, your teacher came from an ==“Application later” paradigm== - they believed that students just need to “get through school” - anyway, they will find good use for what they have learned “later on”. The problem with this, as the example illustrates, is ==the lack of relevance that students feel, and that more often than not, the learning that happens is just good for passing a test.==
      2. In an authentic assessment we design ways to approximate the real life applications of what you aim for them to learn. So, how do we come up with these situations. One helpful tool is called the GRASPS model.
        1. Goal — challenge or problem
        2. Role or Responsibility
        3. Audience
        4. Situation or Scenario
        5. Product or Performance
        6. Standards — Expectations
  3. Reminder: At this point, you may be thinking that authentic assessments should always be a project. The answer is: No. ==What makes it authentic is the task, not the format!== This means that a paper and pen essay could be authentic, if the situation set-up follows GRASPS.
    1. Ex. In a persuasive writing class for college students, an authentic written assessment might sound like this: You have been in charge of a new national committee called the COMELEC Youth (Role). Your goal is to convince young people like you to vote wisely in the upcoming 2022 Philippine Presidential Elections (Goal). As part of your role, you have been asked to give a 20 minute speech to 1000 young leaders from all over the Philippines (Audience), in the opening convention (Situation). Write a compelling script (Product, Standards-assuming what makes something compelling has been learned in this class) for this speech.

Come up with a possible authentic assessment for the learning objective you thought of in the previous exercise. If you came up with a lower order thinking objective, try to come up with a higher level one. Share about your authentic assessment idea below. In doing so:

  1. Identify the subject area and year level
  2. State the learning objective/s.
  3. Describe the idea for an authentic assessment using GRASPS as a guide. (Here’s a helpful  GRASPS Model Worksheet!)
  4. Optional: You may want to add a picture or video clip to help us picture what you have in mind.
# Task
# Learning Objectives

Feedback from Sir. for last exercise

I can imagine how criterion and condition can be confusing. One way to distinguish is to say that: Criterion is the ==“degree, to what extent, how”== of the behavior Condition is the ==“context, situation, givens, when”== of the behavior

E.G. Asher was selected to be the prayer leader for today’s teacher’s day celebration. He was given a written prayer to practice reading last night. Today, he is expected to stand in front of his classmates and read the prayer confidently and with the correct pronunciation. Last night, when we were practicing, there were some words that he could not read since they were unfamiliar to him - words like fulfillment, formator and educator, so we needed to teach him how to say these words.

In this story, the behavior was to be able to read words, the criterion (degree, standard) was to be able to do so confidently with the correct pronunciation, and the condition (context/givens) was from a written text provided. If I had planned for this as a lesson, an objective might be: Asher will be able to read words (behavior) from a given text (condition) confidently and with the correct pronunciation (criterion).

If us teaching him was a learning experience, I would describe the change from reading not confident and with incorrect pronunciation to reading confidently and with proper pronunciation.

Revised Objectives

  1. Students should be able to demonstrate a sufficient understanding of the interactions between culture and technology (behavior) through closed-book short answer tests (condition) where they have to cite keywords + insights from class readings _(criterion)
  2. Utilizing critical theory (criterion), students should be able to analyze contemporary technologies (behavior) through written long-form essays (condition)
  3. Students should be able to critique timely and relevant sociotechnical issues (behavior) rooted in the Philippine postcolonial experience (criterion) through creative group presentations (condition)
# Assessments

1. Identify the subject area and year level

Cultural Studies of Contemporary Technology for 4th Year College students

2. State the learning objective/s.

  1. Students should be able to demonstrate a sufficient understanding of the interactions between culture and technology (behavior) through closed-book short answer tests (condition) where they have to cite keywords + insights from class readings _(criterion)
  2. Utilizing critical theory (criterion), students should be able to analyze contemporary technologies (behavior) through written long-form essays (condition)
  3. Students should be able to critique timely and relevant sociotechnical issues (behavior) rooted in the Philippine postcolonial experience (criterion) through creative group presentations (condition)

3. Describe the idea for an authentic assessment using GRASPS as a guide.

Here’s how I envision what an authentic written assessment in this class would look like: You are a freelance writer who specializes in covering Philippine tech (Role), and the next publication you’re writing for is Rest of World: a global nonprofit dedicated to covering technology beyond the Western bubble that gets an average of 600k+ monthly pageviews (Audience). Web3 is a hot topic right now, as seen in the recent boom of local startups making use of cryptocurrencies + NFTs; the media’s coverage of this hype has mainly consisted of promotional articles (Situation). To counter this, you have been asked to provide a skeptical perspective by discussing the sociocultural, politcal, and economic implications Web3 could have/have had on everyday Filipinos (Goal). For this brief, write an illuminating 1k+ word op-ed article that makes use of critical theory; since these topics (both Web3 and critical theory) tend to be obscure and incomprehensible to a mainstream audience, ensure that your article is easily understandable (Product + Standards).

# Thesis

The Library of Economic Possibility, a publication and database that makes alternative economic concepts and evidence of their real-world results easily accessible to the public.

Bitskwela is a Filipino-led edutech platform that strives to make Bitcoin and cryptocurrency education accessible to all Filipinos of any ethnicity.

In a landscape dominated by either fatalistic views of the irredeemability of technology or by optimism weaponized as hype where venture-backed bandages are presented as all-encompassing solutions, Kernel Magazine articulates an  alternate vision: a critical analysis of technological progress and regress while still charting a path forward.

As a publication by and for technologists, Kernel Magazine is informed not just by theory, but also by our own experiences building, working with, and being affected by tech.

Information Design roots its relevance in problem solving through the effective presentation of relevant information so that it can best be received, understood, and utilized by a target audience. Design and communication theories contextualize and inform the students’ education in graphic design procedures and techniques.

The BS in Computer Science (BS CS)  program provides a rigorous foundation in both the theoretical and practical aspects of computing. Core computer science courses provide the students with an intensive background in writing complex software systems and in the design and interconnection of computers.

Potential Frameworks:

Research I need to do:

Target Audience:

Related Projects:

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