| Topic
4: |
Earlier we suggested you do a quick global
stocktake of the main kinds of assessment conventionally or customarily
carried out across your department, and start thinking about how comfortably
these might sit alongside a student learning stance to teaching. We
shall now develop that idea further.
Let us define your own "disciplinary
situation" in terms of :
- the kinds of subject matter you are
called upon to teach
- the kinds of students you have to teach
it to (i.e. programs they are enrolled in, expectations they have,
backgrounds they come from, previous subjects they need to have studied,
subjects they have to do after yours, etc)
- the levels at which each particular
field of subject matter needs to be taught, and the accompanying standards
that are expected to be reached by students.
- the culture of assessment in your department;
the expectations, traditions, models, your department gives you, the
amount of freedom you have to improvise or innovate, the obligations
you have to other assessors that constrain how far you are permitted
to depart from the prevailing norms.
Using these four notions, write a synopsis
of your own personal disciplinary assessment situation.
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| Task: |
Detailed analysis of one
problematic assessment situation.
1. First, choose from the
overview you have just done, one assessment situation that you would
like to understand better, in order to improve or develop it further.
Identify, within this situation, precisely what you are trying to achieve
(your overall intention) and how you are trying to do it (your overall
strategy).
2. Write down the answers to as many of
these questions as you find relevant:
- what "kinds of understanding"
do you aim for in the subject?
- how confident are you that assessment
is at present giving satisfactory evidence of these? (make notes on
problem areas)
- what other matters beside "understandings"
is the subject trying to teach?
- how confident are you that assessment
is at present giving satisfactory evidence of these? (make notes on
problem areas)
- which theories of learning seem to inform
the way you approach teaching this work?
- how do those theories of learning relate
to the assessment practices currently used?
- If "validity" is used to mean
"success in assessing the very things the subject intends students
to learn", how valid (on a scale of 1 to 10) do you think your
present assessment is? (make notes on validity problem areas)
- If "reliable" means carrying
it out in a manner that gives you confidence you can trust and defend
the figures, how valid would you think your methods are? (make notes
on reliability problem areas)
- How much variety is there in the assessment
methods? Particularly, how much variety between "convergent (narrow/precise/selective/closed)"
and "divergent (broad/generous/open)" methods. Identify
instances of each, if they are available.
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