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Procedures for Educative Assessment
Forward-Looking Assessment Formulate one or two ideas for forward-looking assessment. Identify a situation in which students are likely to use what they have learned, and try to replicate that situation with a question, problem, or issue.
I think that I would keep it to the student’s real work problems for the moment, They will have to write papers in the next semesters and I would asked them to imagine on how they would use today’s session to research on their senior thesis in their major. What types of sources will you use for your senior thesis? How and why would you choose those types of resources?
Criteria & Standards Select one of your main learning goals, and identify at least two criteria that would distinguish exceptional achievement from poor performance. Then write two or three levels of standards for each of these criteria.
One learning goal is to identify a leading journal in their field. A poor performance would be if the student fined a journal that has nothing to do with the subject. A good performance would be if the student presents a journal that covers the subject. If in the journal, some well-known authors in the academic field or the publisher would be a well-known figure, this would add to a good performance. The absence of well-known authors or publishers would lead to a poor performance.
I am not sure how to name my criteria here.
About the standards, the levels of journal reputation could be high, medium, and low – if this makes sense. Idem for the authors who are published in the journal.
Self-Assessment What opportunities can you create for students to engage in self-assessment of their performance?
I refer here to the appendix of the Fink article and the 7 principles of formative feedback. I would ask students when they hand in their assignment what kind of feedback they would appreciate. Self-assessment seems to me a bit abstract so far as I have not experienced it myself or read about it.
“FIDeLity” Feedback What procedures can you develop that will allow you to give students feedback that is:
| Frequent
Immediate |
Discriminating, i.e., based on clear criteria and standards
Lovingly delivered |
FIDeLity Feedback could be formally integrated into the class sessions by using one-minute papers, and individual/collective three question quizzes or kind of instant question and response systems such as socartive.com
The one minute paper could be handed back in the next session and I could give quick feedback to each student. In a way, this is not always realistic as it takes lots of time to give feedback.
Short quizzes could be interesting as I could discuss the responses right away and students would get instant feedback on their replies. Besides, if in a think/pair/share situation students would come up with a response, they would already have discussed the replies before.
The discriminating aspect would come into the picture when the replies are explained. Say for example that I would ask students to find leading journals in an academic field, I will clearly set the standard between popular and scholarly, link to a university of reputation, well known authors, publisher etc. It almost sounds to me as a rubric that would be necessary to see for students what is a high ranking journal and what is not.
Lovingly delivered is – as far as I understand – is an attitude question of the professor toward the students. I believe that having good criteria and standards at hand, are always helpful to make your point leading to a respectful and constructive conversation. Reference sessions are about this, I believe: make the student feel comfortable and telling them what was good and bad.
MS Instructional Design 
You said:
“I will clearly set the standard between popular and scholarly, link to a university of reputation, well known authors, publisher etc. It almost sounds to me as a rubric that would be necessary to see for students what is a high ranking journal and what is not.”
I think this assessment will in fact be really tricky without a rubric. But really, I wonder how realistic this is as a learning goal for students. I think distinguishing between peer-reviewed and popular, or trade, periodicals is definitely necessary. But how would a student know if a particular author is well-known? What is the standard? I can name scholars who are well-known in the discipline, but I don’t think they are known outside of academia. I can tell you what the top journals are for my discipline (communciation), but I would be hard-pressed to name the ones for say, political science. You could show them the ISI rankings as a way of discussing journal quality, but those are pretty fraught, in my opinion. There are also a lot of things about assessing journal quality that are really opaque to undergraduates (like predatory journals).
I guess my advice here is to reevaluate your goals and assessment, and maybe focus more on peer-reviewed vs. other sources, rather than asking students to assess the quality of specific journals. Hope that makes sense! 🙂
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Yes, providing meaningful feedback takes time (try responding to 67 blog posts!). One thing you could try (which Nicole and I are doing for this class) is to review the one minute papers and then provide general feedback based off of major themes you’re seeing. That way you’re still addressing the large concerns of the majority of learners, but you don’t have to give individual feedback for every paper.
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