For the publishing leadership project in week 4 of MAC I presented my project to four of my peers: David Hotler, Virginia Holm, Michael Hood, and Dennis Woodward. We facilitated this presentation using this Google Document and iChat. We met at 7:30PM on May 26th, 2011 and each shared the links to our presentations. After reviewing each presentation we met in an Audio iChat and shared for 5-7 minutes about our work. We each took notes about the others' project and then shared our comments in the Google Document.
Here is the feedback from my fellow-educators:
David Hotler says: What an interesting topic. It is quiet clear from your research methods that this research was empirical based and you found real working results. I love to see that you came to concrete conclusions about immediate feedback, reduction of stress, and testing as a re-teaching tool. It was very interesting to hear you talk about testing styles available in Moodle and about testing engagement. I have always thought of tests as very flat and only do one thing; assess. You have shown that testing can be more than as assessment and can actually engage and re-teach students about the topic. You have also shown, quiet well, that student prefer the online testing to the traditional scan tron or paper test.
I would be interested to see a deeper study about test anxiety and online testing. I have taken several tests online and I am still stressed to/while I take them. What I do not know is if I am just less stressed out or have the same stress level. I would love to see a blind study over the course of a year of high school to actually prove this claim and further support your research. Obviously in the case of Action Research you have shown a positive result and have gotten students and hopefully teachers excited about using online testing for learning.
Virginia Holm says: Michael - I think this type of response system would be great in tests and quizzes, but would be difficult in projects and papers. I like the idea of the second attempt. Students seem to gain confidence when given another try. It also helps to promote their recall on the topic.
I wonder if you only had one question per page on traditional testing methods, if that would decrease anxiety to the extent that the online assessment did? Perhaps it’s not so much the test but the amount of information on the test that causes stress. Did you attempt an online assessment with multiple questions on each screen? How does the online assessment increase or decrease student confidence while the traditional keeps them neutral?
Your presentation was well designed and easy to follow. On the Immediate Feedback slide, I would consider changing the bolded font to another color - perhaps a light golden yellow for further emphasis. I couldn’t really tell it was bold - but then again I am practically blind. Overall I enjoyed your presentation. You kept the audience engaged with questions and were very clear and direct. I look forward to learning what your further evaluation brings to the topic.
Dennis Woodward says: Great job Michael. I, too, think that many of our teachers tend to get into drone mode and feel that the testing or assessment part of the unit is the finale and that information is either retained or lost afterward.
What you are doing with Moodle’s quiz module is amazing. Most teachers would not put the effort that you do into this type of assessment. You clearly are taking every opportunity available to make sure that your students are retaining the information (even at a partial point loss). The fact that your interactive assessments are done online, you have an advantage of getting immediate feedback from the students but also have the ability to give immediate feedback through this interactive quiz or test.
While the platform that you chose (Moodle) is not the trendy content management systems of today, you have proven that this CMS does have features that are superior to most. The results that you have proven through your action research provide valuable data that will hopefully persuade your administration to retire the Scantron type testing scenarios and adopt a system that promotes education through the entire process.
Michael Hood says: Michael, I liked the direction of your research. Scantron responses leave little room for student engagement. You read the test and then mark your answer. Online assessment is an improvement over this. I know I would rather take a test online over a Scantron test. I guess the real challenge is to leverage online assessment’s strength to truly improve student engagement. I know from personal experience that some online assessment actually encourages guessing I had a student that would work on an online math course that allowed the student to retry the problems over and over again until he got it right. Eventually he would guess the right answer and go on to the next problem. Granted, if the program detected a certain pattern of guessing it would re-teach those concepts. But in reality he had learned how to game the system and really wasn’t learning the math. So online assessment is a method that requires a certain amount of vigilance.
Scantron testing and to a certain degree online testing leaves little room for judging the degree of student engagement. There are no essays to grade and no teacher response to them. I feel a lot of teachers rely on Scantron to relieve them of the burden of reading through and grading every students test. Who can blame them? Teachers have an incredible amount of work to do and it seems like every year they just get more responsibilities added to their workload.
No comments:
Post a Comment