Tidying the assessment for EDP4130

With just a few weeks until the start of semester I’m working on my course materials and website for EDP4130 Technology Curriculum and Pedagogy. Consistent with my belief that students are most often most interested in what they need to do to successfully complete the course I’ve been giving a lot of attention to the design of the assessment. My approach might be described as some variation of assessment for learning in which I attempt to design assessment that will encourage students to engage with what I think is the important learning in the course.

Ideally I would design assessment around a series of mostly small tasks that would spread the workload for students and for markers, avoiding the tsunami of marking that usually mounts at mid-semester and the end. That approach would allow me to provide meaningful feedback through the semester so that students do not suffer nasty surprises on high stakes items and can take corrective action, if necessary, in time to make a worthwhile difference to their final grades. I’ve worked in courses where the assessment consisted of (almost) weekly tasks linked to learning activities that occur in class. That can often be arranged so that students complete much of the necessary work in class leaving relatively little demand on their time out of class. It usually also means that they have feedback within a week so that they can adjust their approach.

Unfortunately that approach to assessment is not acceptable right here and now so I am limited to 3 pieces of assessment though those may include multiple components. That allows linking of assessment to the learning activities as  I might want to but imposes restrictions on due dates so that feedback is less frequent than might be desirable to shape progress.

Given those constraints, in addition to the professional experience that must be satisfactorily completed for students to pass the course, the 3 assessment items are as follows:

I’m now in the process of working through those components to ensure that things are complete, adequately explained, and presented so that they will be accessible and clear to students.

I posted yesterday about finalising the digital technologies learning activities and now have both those and the related assessment requirements in place. Rather than directly assess the activities, though the quizzes may include some specific items about Scratch programming, I have opted to require students to write a reflective blog post for each of the four phases and share that with their personal learning network. Their reflections are to briefly describe the activity, make links to the Australian Curriculum documents, explain what they learned, and comment on potential application in primary classrooms. The actual assessable piece will be a report that summarises the content of those posts. I hope the result will be encouragement for students to think about what they are learning through the activities, both at the time they are working with them and toward the end of semester, and a piece of work that is manageable for all involved in the submission and marking process. 

Some months ago I posted about adjustments to the WebQuest about Coal Seam Gas that I developed for a previous offer. It had worked fairly well but feedback from students suggested that some changes might be in order.  Those changes were made and the CSG WebQuest is now tidied up with links to resources checked and should be ready for use.

I’ve used variations of the design brief activity since I first developed a technology education course in 2002. The first iterations were in classes on campus where students worked in groups one week to develop a design brief that could be managed by a group of their peers within a standard class period. The following week briefs were exchanged around groups and responses generated. After some debriefing discussion students wrote a short report for assessment. Since 2011, when EDP4130 was offered online as well as on campus, I have used the Moodle database to manage the exchange of briefs among individuals or small groups. Assessment is still based on a report about the activity and what was learned. For 2013 I’ve adjusted the report requirements and associated marking guide on the basis of feedback from 2012. Those elements are ready but I have yet to revise the materials that guide the activity. A significant part of the work for that may be to revise the instructions and illustrations for the database following our move from Moodle 1.9 to Moodle 2.x. 

I posted my early thinking about the content curation task some time ago. The basic requirements for the planning to be reported on in Task 1 and the collection and report to appear in the assignment are written up. What remains to be done there is to provide some introductory material about curation and PLNs. I’ve been collecting resources for that in my Diigo space but will need to find time to extract and present the key points.

Preparation for the quizzes is similarly incomplete. I have some material for the first quiz that I prepared in previous years. With a little updating and addition of some Scratch questions that will serve. The second quiz will need to have items developed as I put together the balance of the semester resources.