Thursday 2 October 2008

Formative e-assessment workshop

To day I am down at the WLE center at the university of London attending their JISC project workshop on formative assessment.

We are all in groups working towards developing some case studies on one persons experiences of formative assessment. These case studies are being constructed through the person talking about their experience, another types the information directly into the projects wiki page. At the moment we are in the process of listening to other groups explaining the case study (this person is not the case study individual or the person who typed the assessment.)

It is really interesting to see the different uses of assessment. From the WebPA project formative assessment is an area that is not really exploited to its full potential. It would be nice to gather examples of where the WebPA tool is to assist formative assessment.

I think that from today I will take away a number of things, both for the project and also ideas for what we may wish to include in our user group day.

2 comments:

Matt Barney, Ph.D. said...

I've found it curious to distinguish between "Formative" and "Summative" assessment. Yes, there are differences in the ways and types of feedback we give, but the real meat of the measurement issue in Assessment is the same. Are you learning about Rasch Measurement or Item Response Theory?

Nic said...

We are not looking at assessment in terms of psychometrics or analysing the responses to a particular question.

The way in which assessment takes place in Higher Education in the UK is the main aim. We often differentiate between formative and summative assessment. For the purposes of this workshop we where looking for patterns in assessment practice, and in the formative arena. However, the day did begin with an exploration of the literature(http://patternlanguagenetwork.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Groups.FormativeEAssessment/Literature+Review)and what is meant by formative assessment. The general consensus is that the students use of formative feedback to inform their learning, where as summative feedback tells the student of their weakness lie.

For the purposes of the project I am working on we are interested to see if the students use the feedback at the formative stage to see if this changes their summative assessment. The feedback provided is generated from peer review of their contribution to a group work activity. Hence when we examine the data we are not examining particular responses but whether the student has learnt through the experience.