Assessment and Evaluation

Assessment and Evaluation is the topic covered this week and with the readings provided, I got to better understand the terms and what they entail. The two terms undoubtedly play integral parts in the realm of education. Assessment is the process by which learners are assigned grades; however, I learned that it is more than just grades: it is a form of feedback for Instructors, students, and all stake holders; it drives student learning; and an vital tool for informed decision making regarding improvements in courses, programs, or the curriculum.  

Due to the important role assessment plays in the learning environment, I gathered that the facilitator needs to take the following into consideration in the planning of a course.

1.      Assessment tasks (AT) are aligned with the learning outcomes/objectives

2.       AT should mostly feature the higher order thinking skills of Bloom’s taxonomy

3.      A variety of AT is required (do not stick to multiple choice or short answer questions only)

4.      To move away from the ‘superficial learning’ that was usually a stigma of traditional methods of assessments, AT should be authentic, relevant and suitable to the learners.

My reflection

I am happy to yet learn more new things this week, in particular those related to assessment and evaluation. In my training to becoming a teacher of Primary School 30 years ago, I learnt that the means by which we assess learners are through multiple questions, short answers, comprehension questions, true/false questions, cloze type questions, fill in the blank questions, letter writing and essays. I also learnt that AT should be designed to feature the learning outcomes, and I did not have difficulties with this; however, I sometimes felt the superficialness of these tasks in portraying a true picture of a learners understanding of a subject matter. In Multiple Choice questions for example, where questions were mostly framed under the Recall and Knowledge levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, it was difficult to know whether there was actually any learning taking place because right answers could also be obtained from rote learning or memorisation, which do not say much about students’ learning. I also felt that my learning outcomes/objectives were not measurable sometimes because the AT given learners did not measure the intended objective. One thing I now realise is that constructing AT takes a huge amount of time and careful consideration of areas such as summative or formative or both, which type to use – one that would best bring out the best in learners, and/or ones that would make learners think critically and so forth. It is no longer a simple task; the success of AT depends on the hands of the facilitator.

Authentic Assessment, I believe, should be encouraged in the arena of education whether it be ‘traditional’ or online because students need to demonstrate that they have actually understood what they have been taught, not by way of Multiple Choice, or true/false questions, but by engaging them in tasks that are authentic, relevant and suitable for them. With an online course this might be a challenge given the diversity of your learners; how would you devise AT that suit the different contexts of your learners; how would you account for the different learning styles; or how would you grade them fairly given these differences. I think these are some of the things that we online facilitators need to seriously consider in the planning stage of our online courses. The CAT brings you a lot of AT that you can adapt to suit your context. 

Authentic assessments will be good for students of the Pacific Island countries because it will allow them to get away from being passive learners and become more productive learners, which requires a huge amount of work from the facilitator. 

Thank you for the readings.