Determine assessment purposes and methods
| Site: | WMO Education and Training Programme |
| Course: | Calmet Moodle Unit 4 - Design opportunities for practice and assessment |
| Book: | Determine assessment purposes and methods |
| Printed by: | Guest user |
| Date: | Thursday, 18 April 2024, 6:24 AM |
Description
This is a book
1. Purposes of Assessment
Assessment can be useful before, during, and after training. It serves many purposes.
- guide what
learning is required by individuals or groups of learners--placement within a
curriculum;
- allow learners to
skip training on topics for which they demonstrate skill or prior knowledge;
- used to
establish learning needs for planning what to
train;
- establish a
baseline to demonstrate gains in knowledge and skill after training.
- help learners and
teachers monitor progress;
- provide important
opportunities for practice and feedback that increase learning;
- address
misconceptions and errors before they become ingrained;
- increase
motivation by building confidence through incremental success, as opposed to
assessment only at completion.
- demonstrate
successful achievement of learning outcomes;
- help guide
students who are prepared to new learning opportunities;
- demonstrate
readiness to enter a job by contributing to qualifications;
- in the form of competency assessment, demonstrate adequate skill to fulfill a job responsibility.
2. Alignment of Assessment
In some ways, assessment is simple. If you have established appropriate learning outcomes based on the goals of the training, your assessment is halfway done. If you know what outcomes learners should demonstrate, then you just need to design an assessment that demonstrates them.
If the defined learning outcome is complex, such as this one,
“Forecast precipitation intensity, onset, cessation, amount, type, and
associated visibility for aviation operations,” then you know that you have
to assess skill in the ability to forecast each of these elements and produce
forecast products that are useful to aviation customers. You
also know that much background knowledge underpins this capability—like
knowledge of mechanisms that generate precipitation and the ability to analyze
products for indications of the conditions for precipitation.
While demonstrating this skill requires a complex assessment or on-the-job observation over long periods of time, the building blocks of this performance can be assessed in less complex ways. For example, we can more easily assess the ability to analyze individual data products. With even more reliability, we can assess knowledge of precipitation formation mechanisms. In other words, a full assessment might utilize several formats.
Well-written multiple choice questions using a Moodle Quiz can go a long way to assess background knowledge and even more complex skills. Discussions via a Forum can probe more deeply to diagnose what learners know. Short exercises via a Lesson can test whether learners have developed analysis skills. Simulations using an external tool or combinations of Moodle activities and resources might demonstrate the entire set of skills implied in the learning outcome.3. Forms of assessment
A list of many forms of assessment is presented below. Moodle can be used to implement or support most of these forms.
- Quiz items, including multiple choice, true/false, matching,
fill-in-the-blank, short- or long-text answer : Quiz, Choice, Feedback
- Written tests, essay
questions: Assignment, Forum
- Contributions to
discussions: Forum
- Papers, reports, or projects: Assignment, Wiki
- Problems and exercises: Lesson, Quiz
- Student-created
diagrams/illustrations/concept maps: Assignment, Forum
- Interviews: Forum, Feedback
- Observation of practice or
work tasks: Assignment might be used to provide evidence
- Peer-assessment: Workshop, Forum
- Self-assessment: Quiz, Grading Rubric, Blog
- Role play: Chat, Forum to some extent
- Simulation or case study: Lesson, Quiz, Forum, Chat, Feedback, External Tool (combinations of these)
- Real-time (actual) work: Difficult to achieve real-time assessment, but Assignment can provide near real-time evidence
- Portfolios of collected student/employee work: Assignment, Workshop
4. Setting your assessment strategy
First you will need to decide which purposes (diagnostic, formative, summative) assessment will serve. At minimum, we suggest that you use both formative and summative assessments to guide learners.
At this point, you should examine the range of Moodle activities and resources described on the Forms of Assessment page (the page immediately before this one). The rest of Unit 4 describes how to set up and use each of the tools in more detail.
Consider the following for your strategy.
- Using a variety of forms of assessment provides a richer and more detailed picture of the learning that is taking place.
- Providing ample opportunities for formative assessment, or practice with feedback, can be one of the most important aids to learning.
- Design practice opportunities with clear instructions to avoid frustration for both learners and yourself.
- Ensure that your assessment opportunities are fair, appropriate, valid, reliable, transparent, authentic, manageable, and engaging. In other words, assessment should
- Provide equal opportunity
for success (fair)
- Address the defined learning
objectives (appropriate)
- Demonstrate achievement of
the objectives (valid)
- Be consistent between
students and assessment instances (reliable)
- Be clearly understood by
learners (transparent)
- Be relevant to the working
world (authentic)
- Be of the right scope for
students and teachers (manageable)
- Encourage learners to invest
the time (engaging)
- Communicating your assessment strategy to learners is very important. It establishes a "contract" with the learner, telling them your expectations for successful completion.
In addition, this Unit 4 discusses methods for tracking progress using assessment tools. These include:
- Setting up a Grade Book
- Activating Completion Tracking and type of completion
- Using Reports and Logs to track progress