Pablo
Vazquez
EDU697:
Capstone: A Project Approach
Professor
Keith Pressey
December
23, 2013
This activity will
demonstrate the attainment of Program Learning Outcome 6 to “Technology resources to facilitate
effective assessment and evaluation” and Program Learning Outcome 7 “Utilize technology to collect and analyze
data, interpret results, and communicate findings”.
With the ever growing inclusion
of technology in the classroom, educators have had to include more innovative
ways of performing evaluations and assessments in order to ensure that the
quality of education they are delivering is truly efficient and that their
students are truly learning and retaining the content they are being taught. For
this paper, I will be selecting a prior MATLT activity that demonstrates the attainment
of Program Learning Outcome 6 to “technology resources to facilitate effective
assessment and evaluation” and Program Learning Outcome 7 “Utilize technology
to collect and analyze data, interpret results, and communicate findings”. I
will then redesign the activity using instructional design principles and
theory. Using learning in prior courses and the Week Four Discussion, I will
include an explanation of which principles and theory I chose and why.
Additionally, I will include a discussion of any design and implementation
challenges experienced during the redesign process and how they were overcome.
For this project I chose to revisit an activity from my
MATLT course EDU652: Instructional Design and Delivery. The activity was
created in the form of a PowerPoint presentation about the Solar System. It was
made with the purpose of introducing the students in the 8th grade
class to the topic of the Solar System and the planets that compose it. Students
would learn through this presentation the order in which these planets are from
the sun and several of their distinctive characteristics. Also, they would
learn about the different areas of the Solar System that aren’t exactly planets
like the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter and of course the
dwarf planets that also exist within the System. From this activity we want to
determine if the students will be able to logically compare and contrast the
many differences between Earth and the other neighboring planets with
differences like the amount of moons Mars has in comparison to earth and
similarities like the possibility of Mars having once had water on its surface
just like the Earth (Pasichnyk, 2011). The students would discuss and analyze
the planets of the Solar System and as an activity following the introduction
of the Topic; the students would break into groups and of three (30 students in
the class room) and each group would create a poster of the planet that they
will be assigned to them after the instructor picks a the planet’s name from a
basket in a raffle. Each group are then tasked with creating a detailed poster
of the planet which will include information about how many moons it has, the
number of its orbit from the sun and basic details about the planet and its
surface. One of the groups will be assigned to discuss the remainder celestial
bodies from in the solar system like the Meteor Belt and the last group will
cover the known Dwarf planets which are Pluto, Charon, Dysnomia, Ceres and
Eris.
I chose this activity in particular because of its
simplistic nature. The assignment is not demanding at all and furthermore it
lacks concrete criteria which the students should follow, criteria necessary
for an educator to make a correct assessment on their work. With technology
becoming more common in the early levels of education, it would not be uncommon
for students using educational tools like PowerPoint, Jing, or Screencast to make
their own presentations. Therefore to include more elements of technology and
provide students with more tools for their activity, I would ask these groups
to collaborate online on a presentation like the one I created on PowerPoint,
about the Planets or Planetoids they were assigned. Although this change does
not exactly count as an Assessment method, the inclusion of technology will
definitely will help lead to more efficient and varied methods of assessment
and evaluation.
One
of the first changes I would do to this activity is adding an online rubric for
the Assignment criteria. A rubric is an easily applicable form of authentic
assessment. A rubric simply lists a set of criteria, which defines and
describes the important components of the work being planned or evaluated. For
example, students giving a research presentation might be graded in three
areas, content, display, and presentation (iEarn, 2013). Well-designed rubrics
increase an assessment's construct and content validity by aligning evaluation
criteria to standards, curriculum, instruction, and assessment tasks. They also
manage to increase an assessment's reliability by setting criteria that raters
can apply consistently and objectively (CARLA, 2013). Rubrics help also reduce
bias assists learners set goals and assume responsibility for their learning;
this is something that matches with the theory of Constructivism.
The
effects of constructivism in instructional design have been thoroughly
investigated by Duffy and Jonassen. Of this, Duffy has stated that “Many of the
authors believe that purposeful knowledge construction may be facilitated by
learning environments which: provide multiple representations of reality,
thereby: avoiding oversimplification of instruction by representing the natural
complexity of the real world; focus on knowledge construction, not reproduction;
present authentic tasks (contextualizing rather than abstracting instruction);
provide real-world, case-based learning environments, rather than pre-determined
instructional sequences; foster reflective practice; enable context and
content-dependent knowledge construction; and supporting collaborative construction
of knowledge through social negotiation, not competition among learners for
recognition (Duffy & Jonassen; 1992).
These
characteristics of constructivist learning environment suggest the use of
rubrics as qualitative and authentic tool to assess leaning. Well-designed
rubric can be used for the purpose of instruction, motivation, and evaluation
in constructivist learning environment. In an online collaborative environment,
rubrics can be used for self- and peer-assessment by allowing learners develop
their ability to judge quality in their own and others' work.
Another
change I would do is to create a Blog where the students will be able to upload
their presentations making them accessible online. After presenting their
projects to the whole class, they will then be asked to engage in an online assessment
exam on the content they have just reviewed (The site will have the projects
for them to view whenever they need to) and answer 20 question which provide an
organized and systematic approach to assessment. These digital exams feature. There
they would find a variety of traditional testing methods such as multiple choices,
true and false, and matching. This online test would not be designed to give
them a mere score on a test, but to rather provide them with feedback and extra
information every time the y answers. Wrong answers would get feedback and an
explanation on which is the correct answer and providing the right answer would
give them additional content to learn. This would count as a method of
Formative assessment, which
involves
qualitative feedback rather than scores for both student and teacher that
focuses on the details of content and performance (Hutha, 2010).
One
of the most difficult aspects of redesigning this activity was finding a one in
my MATLT courses that could be modified to have elements for assessment. I
chose this activity in particular because it was missing the element that
allowed both students and educator to determine if whether or not an activity
has been effectively learned and knowledge retained. I also found difficulty in
creating the online assessment in a way that it was not simply a questionnaire
that would measure what the students had learned. I wanted the assessment to
have the educational trait that ensured that even then; the students were still
learning the content. That is why I chose formative assessment, so that the
students would receive feedback on their work rather than be given a score for
their work.
In
conclusion, from working with these activities it is evident to me how
important these assessments are to instructional design and how they help us
determine how efficiently content is taught and acquired by the students. Now
more than ever, educational technological tools are helping us perform these
assessments and evaluations more efficiently and accurately. In this paper, I
have selected a prior MATLT activity that demonstrates the attainment of
Program Learning Outcome 6 to “technology resources to facilitate effective
assessment and evaluation” and Program Learning Outcome 7 “Utilize technology
to collect and analyze data, interpret results, and communicate findings”. I then
redesigned the activity using instructional design principles and theory. Using
learning in prior courses and the Week Four Discussion, I included an
explanation of which principles and theory I chose and why. Additionally, I
included a discussion of any design and implementation challenges experienced
during the redesign process and how they were overcome.
Revised Assignment
References
CARLA
(2013). Process: Why use rubrics?; University of Minnesota. Retrieved on
December 23, 2013 from http://www.carla.umn.edu/assessment/vac/evaluation/p_5.html
Duffy,
T.M. & Jonassen, D. (Eds.), (1992).Constructivism and the technology of
instruction: A conversation; Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Retrieved on December 22, 2013 from http://heic.info/assets/templates/heic2011/papers/05-Al-Mothana_Gasaymeh.pdf
Huhta,
Ari (2010). Diagnostic and Formative Assessment; In Spolsky, Bernard and Hult,
Francis M. The Handbook of Educational Linguistics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. pp.
469–482.
iEARN
(2013). What is a Rubric; iEARN. Retrieved on December 23, 2013 from http://us.iearn.org/professional_development/multimedia/assess/rubric.html
Pasichnyk,
R. M. (2011) Similarities of the Planets; LivingCosmos.com. Retrieved on April
14, 2013 from http://www.livingcosmos.com/celestial.htm
