Week 9

DCL Course Notes Week 9

Assessment in the 21st Century

Beyond curricular issues, classrooms today typically lack 21st century learning and teaching in part because high-stakes tests do not assess these competencies. Assessments and tests focus on measuring students’ fluency in various abstract, routine skills, but typically do not assess their strategies for expert decision making when no standard approach seems applicable. Essays emphasize simple presentation rather than sophisticated forms of rhetorical interaction. Students’ abilities to transfer their understandings to real world situations are not assessed, nor are capabilities related to various aspects of teamwork. The use of technological applications and representations is generally banned from testing, rather than measuring students’ capacities to use tools, applications, and media effectively. Abilities to effectively utilize various forms of mediated interaction are typically not assessed. As discussed later, valid, reliable, practical assessments of 21st century skills are needed to improve this situation.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) suggests Authentic 21st century assessments are the essential foundation of a 21st century education. Assessments must measure all five results that matter; core subjects, 21st century content, learning and thinking skills, ICT literacy, and life skills. Assessment of 21st century skills should be integrated with assessments of core subjects. Separate assessments would defeat the purpose of infusing 21st century skills into core subjects. To be effective, sustainable and affordable, assessments must use modern technologies to increase efficiency and timeliness. Standardized tests alone can only measure some of the important skills and knowledge students should learn. A balance of assessments, including high-quality standardized testing along with effective classroom assessments, offers students and teachers a powerful tool to master the content and skills central to success.

Formative Assessment

Formative assessment supports the constructivist theory of learning and connectivism. In a constructivist manner, learners are accountable for their learning and the creation of knowledge, through open-ended questioning, cooperative situations, discussions, meaningful context and quizzes. Connectivism alos applies since collaborations through technology promote human contact, and at the same time provide human content.

Choosing an Online Tool for Formative Assessment

Several online tools can help with assessment by collecting and storing data on student knowledge, offering easy access later. 

Poll Everywhere

Students can submit answers via computer or mobile device to a question (which can be multiple choice, free response, or even an image poll) that the teacher displays by downloading a PowerPoint slide or through the website. The advantage of Poll Everywhere (www.polleverywhere.com) is the instant tally that appears, allowing the teacher to quickly assess the collective knowledge of the group. The disadvantage is that you cannot review individual student answers.

Kahoot 

Kahoot (https://getkahoot.com/ to create a session or www. kahoot.it/join for students to participate) is a game-based polling activity. The teacher designs the questions and receives a code. Students who enter the code can participate in the quiz, earning points for correct answers and speedy responses. Top scores (using student created nicknames, allowing them to retain anonymity) are displayed, often increasing student enthusiasm. 

Icard (2014) suggested that students should be enticed by the competitive nature of the game if it is going to be a valuable learning experience for the students. According to Icard (2014) students benefit from using digital games in the classroom by learning how to handle success and failure as well as how to use critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Thus, Kahoot! is a digital game that can be used in classrooms to engage students in content in a fun way. Kahoot! not only fosters a fun learning environment, but also challenges students in the learning process. (http://itdl.org/Journal/Mar_14/Mar14.pdf#page=41)

Socrative

A more robust question-and-answer experience is found at Socrative (www.socrative.com), a web- or phone-based product that allows teachers to create quizzes with multiple choice, true/false, graded-short-answer or open-response questions. Teachers can even share quizzes they have made with other users. Socrative gives instant results but also has reports available on the back end that allow for analysis at the student or class level. When using Socrative, the teacher can allow students to go through at their own pace (with or without receiving immediate feedback) or as led by the teacher.

NearPod

NearPod (www.nearpod.com) offers interactive question slides that can contain polls, quizzes, and open-ended questions. Teachers can add videos, images, Twitter feeds, and web pages. Each student needs his or her own internet-connected device to interact with the presentation. NearPod can be used in either a synchronized or self-paced manner. In synchronized lessons, students log in with a code, and the teacher controls the pace of the lesson. Each slide is pushed out to the devices, keeping students on task with their teacher. Self-paced lessons, in contrast, allow students to progress through the slides on their own. In either case, the teacher can access student responses via reports.

Plickers

The above tools require that students have their own computing devices. Other similar tools do not. For example, Plickers (www.plickers.com) uses a smartphone to collect student data, but only the teacher needs a device. To begin, the teacher downloads and prints the Plickers cards, unique to each student, which can be mounted on card stock and laminated. The student, upon hearing a question, holds a card upright to indicate his or her answer from a set of multiple choices. The teacher uses the free Plicker app on a smartphone to scan student responses. The app aggregates the answers on the phone screen and also allows the teacher to review students' individual responses on the website.

Some other tools that might be used for assessment purposes include TodaysMeet (Collaboration), Padlet (Collaborative canvas), Xmind (Mindmapping),ForAllRubrics (Rubric creation), PollDaddy, Formative (Real-time FA), MovieMaker (video assessments), ThinkBinder (Collaboration) and Google Docs(Collaboration) 

Which One(s) to Choose? - Evaluating Educational Apps

One of the challenges is wading through the huge number apps available. Effectively evaluating formative assessment data is an essential skill for all teachers. Most of the tools suggested above provide the data teachers need to monitor and adjust their teaching according to current student knowledge. While the amount of preparation increases with the complexity of the tools, the benefits of receiving individual and whole-class data also increase and can be invaluable in evaluating lessons and student progress.

Harry Walker is the Principal of Sandy Plains Elementary School in Baltimore County, Maryland. He has crafted a rubric to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of an app in terms of how it may impact on student achievement. His criteria include curriculum connection, authenticity, feedback, differentiation, user friendliness, and student motivation. 

RISE model for Meaningful Feedback

Emily Wray's RISE model encourages teachers to provide feedback that is not simply informative, but moves students toward improvement.

Engagement and Flow

Shernoff defines engagement as a heightened, simultaneous experience of concentration, interest, and enjoyment in the task at hand. His definition includes no presumptions about how students should think, feel, behave, or relate to school. You might notice that his definition includes no mention of school whatsoever, so that engagement in academic contexts can be viewed as on par and comparable to that experienced in other less formal contexts. That definition is based completely in the experiences of students, so that engagement may be considered as a learning experience, one to be valued in its own right. This definition is rooted in Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) conceptualisation of 'flow experience.' Flow is an optimal state of cognitive and emotional engagement, so absorbing that one may lose track of time and awareness of the self. Although the nature of schoolwork can vary, the ideal state of engagement could maybe be an active attentiveness and problem solving or the fashioning of products that promotes learning and the development of new skills, an ideal that flow experiences encapsulate.

Research tends to converge on the observation that meaningful engagement is composed of two independent processes; academic intensity and a positive emotional response. Optimal learning environments provide academic intensity through environmental challenge characterized by clear goals and high expectations for performance with complex tasks found to be relevant to students’ lives and the community at large. They also support students to succeed through motivational support, positive relationships, feedback, and opportunities for action and collaboration.

Flow and engagement can be contagious, having the potential to cross over from teacher to student, student to teacher, and permeate an entire group participating in a shared activity. New immersive technologies also show promising signs of enhancing student engagement to learn in the future. Indeed, there are many routes to engaging youth; creating meaningful engagement requires attention to a variety of contextual, instructional, developmental, and interpersonal factors beyond the preoccupation with narrowly defined educational “outcomes.”

Research has shown that the positive development of youth occurs through a constellation of resources that provide physical safety and security, developmentally appropriate structure and expectations for behavior, emotional and moral support, and opportunities to make a contribution to one’s community (Eccles and Gootman 2002). 

Recommended readings:

Gootman, J. A., & Eccles, J. (Eds.). (2002). Community programs to promote youth development. National Academies Press.

Lee, C-Y. & Cherner, T. S. (2015). A comprehensive evaluation rubric for assessing instructional apps. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research, 14, 21-53. Retrieved from http://www.jite.org/documents/Vol14/JITEV14Researc...

Shaffer, D. (2009). Epistemic Network Analysis: A Prototype for 21st Century Assessment of Learning. International Journal of Learning and Media , 1(2), 33-53. Retrieved from: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7nA8sBYIXlRVW83aHNTdkpZV2M/view?usp=sharing

Shernoff, D. (Ed. 2013). Optimal Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement (Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development). Dordrecht: Springer.

LDC Course Notes Week 9

What can we learn from other education systems? 

During the last decade, Finland has become a target of international education pilgrimage. Thousands of educators and policy makers have visited Finnish schools and observed classrooms to figure out why this small Nordic nation is leading the Western world in many education rankings.

This week's leadership topic is partly focused on the success of the Finnish education system and the reasons why one small country, not much larger than New Zealand, has experienced such incredible educational success.

For more information, see the article Teachers as Leaders in Finland

How do we define success?

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in member and non-member nations of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance in mathematics, science, and reading. Even if there are many positive affects in this sort of skills comparison it also provokes strong debate from educators the world over. 

When it was developed, it was created as a diagnostic tool to bring together education policymakers together to discuss and track education and education improvement. However, in recent years, it has become widely criticised as a league table that is used as a indicator of a country's education health. Sir Ken Robinson criticised PISA for “squeezing out” other more creative subjects and creating an anxiety around education that was “grotesque”. OECD has responded by announcing that Pearson has been chosen to develop the PISA 2018 Student Assessment 21st Century Framework.https://www.pearson.com/news/announcements/2014/de...

How we define an education system's success depends on how we define it on a personal level. If we think that IQ does not determine personal success, what is it instead? Is it maybe the outcome of grit, perseverance, optimism, curiosity, empathy, sense of rightness, social intelligence and other character traits? Paul Tough emphasizes that character traits, not cognitive skills measured by IQ tests, lead to success.

Does teaching require cultural intelligence?

We know that teaching requires Emotional and Social Intelligence, but many claim that we should also focus on our Cultural intelligence. We should also help our students to become more Culturally intelligent in this culturally diverse world. Research comparing educational achievement between countries is growing, but drawing conclusions from it is harder. Perhaps this might require cultural intelligence?