Exams 2.0

Next week are mid - term exams.

Approximately the middle of the school year, locally designed, written, and marked; I still struggle with them.

How to design a test for each of the four subject areas that I am required to host exams for (Language Arts, Social Studies, Science and Math) that is fair and that encapsulates a lot of what we have done to this point in the school year?

Old argument I know. But it still holds water.

While we've learned quite a lot as a community about the pedagogy and the tools of classroom 2.0, our thoughts about assessment have been relatively few. What would a 2.0 exam look like? I'm not sure I know if exams would even be a legitimate form of assessment in a classroom truly moving in this direction but a few ideas might include:

- posting the exams online and letting the kids work things out over a few days
- letting students gather information from any source: library books, textbooks, their personal learning network
- the exams would include both knowledge and skills components for each subject area
- exams that are multi disciplinary and problem based or focused
- students may be required to post something online or use a tool such as ustream and feedback might be collected from various sources
- this feedback might offer the students an opportunity to revise and improve the work they have completed before calling something a "final draft"
- the students themselves might be involved in designing the assessments, giving them an opportunity to have input regarding what they feel are the big issues and important learnings they have worked with so far in the school year

Basically, we need to take everything we know about evaluation (who designs them, who marks them, where, when and how they are completed) and turn it on its head.

Another small task.

Tags: exams, evaluation, classroom

Comments

[Rodd Lucier]

Exam 2.0 should be unrecognizable from exams today (and exams yesterday). The idea that students can demonstrate their learning of course content by recording what they can recall, is antiquated.

When exams become authentic responses to real world problems or scenarios that allow students to use a wide range of tools, educators will be able to assess not only student learning, but will gain great insight into the relevance of the course(s) taught.

[Diane Quirk]

It sounds like you've already figured out that the best way for you to assess your students, who have been immersed in the use of tools that allow them to think and create new knowledge from what they're learning, is to ask them to continue to think for themselves and to use their knowledge in some meaningful way. If they've learned with the tools and they have access to the tools then asking them to answer a meaningless set of multiple choice questions won't allow you to see exactly what your students have learned and how they can use that knowledge.

Most of what we know about assessment/evaluation is still 20th century thinking isn't it? I sometimes scratch my head at the attitude of teachers in my district who believe that their students entire set of knowledge about reading and writing is to be judged by those 2 or 3 days in January when they take the high stakes ELA (or whatever)test. I say, teach them to be good readers and writers and thinkers, teach with that goal in mind and the test will take care of itself. We spend too much time worrying about one point in time and not on assessing what students can do on a daily basis with what they know.

[Jo McLeay]

Maybe we have to think about who wants exams and why. It is the old question? assessment of learning, or assessment as learning. Sounds like you're thinking of exams as learning which is what I would think as well. But the exams you have to "host" are for another reason I think.
Jo

[Clarence Fisher]

Jo I think you capture a lot in your short comment. I believe that we know much about assessment best practices and goals. We know these things, but often we are unable to implement them in our classrooms due to the constraints placed upon us by our systems. We have much to learn because we have so much still to try in any organized and sustained way.

[C. Ashley]

As a future teacher, I think your assessment ideas are not only insightful and useful, but also easy to implement into schools today. Exams nowadays are often unable to assess the mastery of skills taught, often just having students parrot back facts that they have learned strictly to pass a class and will soon forget. If we can implement innovative assessments that use new tools and display relevance to the real world and to our students, we can ensure that students are genuinely learning relevant information and skills.