Assessment Practices - Artifact Seven Reflection:
Any discussion on digital literacy and 21st-century learning may need an inquiry into existing assessment practices. Madaus & O'Dwyer's (1999) historical review of academic assessment, Short history of performance assessment: Lessons learned, explains that by the 19th century, assessment has been structured to gauge a student’s recall of specific pieces of information, out of context of what we would presently call 'the bigger picture' (p. 692). This deviation from the historic norms of authentic assessment became de facto as the mechanical inventions of the 20th century initiated a large-scale, machine driven, scoring and ranking of students (p.693). By the 1980s, criticism grew of rote memorization for testing as new approaches to authentic tasks were beginning to be experimented with in the classroom. The thought is that merely preparing students for standardized testing robs them of the opportunity to develop critical thinking skills needed to be successful in life (Darling-Hammond, 1994, p.19). Cumming et al. (1999) state, referring to the work of Newmann & Archbald (1992), that:
[The] fundamental question of what general forms of achievement ought to be promoted and assessed…is not mainly with the technical problem of designing assessments that measure more validly what schools try to teach. Ultimately then, the quality and utility of assessment rest upon the extent to which the outcomes measured represent appropriate, meaningful, significant, and worthwhile forms of human accomplishment. We synthesize these qualities into one idea: authenticity (p. 178).
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What I have learned from my time in the UOIT grad program is that authentic tasks take many forms, but all should strive to establish means for the assessment of student learning. At the core, these tasks focus on challenging performance-oriented tasks that require “analysis, integration of knowledge and invention, as well as highly developed written and oral expression, rather than merely recall and recognition of facts” (Darling-Hammond, p.19). To do this, there must be a move from a teacher-centred ‘instructivist’ approach, where activities are strictly a means of the vehicle for practice (Herrington et al., 2002, p.563). As mentioned by Herrington et al (2002), authentic tasks are often complex and extremely difficult to manage without some guidance and support of the teacher and by other students within collaborative groups: “such complex and sustained activities can guide learning in entire courses of study, where the activity does not supplement the course—it is the course” (p.563). This is compounded if the teacher or student have limited technical knowledge of digital literacies. Authentic tasks are much more than one-off examinations of memorized knowledge, but ongoing performances of learned knowledge with ample opportunity for collaboration, reflection, multi-subject integration, and, importantly, the allowance of a diversity of outcomes (p.564).
The following artifact is a slideshow presentation I prepared for Dr. Hughes’ EDUC 5304G Digital Literacies: Theory, Practice, and Research course. Having recently finished Dr. Barber's Authentic Assessment course, this assignment was built upon my previous research in assessing student achievement. Using Lombardi (2008) and Vincent's (2006) research on authentic learning and assessment in the 21st-century as a springboard, the slideshow explains new assessment practices, as well as a lengthy case study of such practices in an inner-city New York school.
The following artifact is a slideshow presentation I prepared for Dr. Hughes’ EDUC 5304G Digital Literacies: Theory, Practice, and Research course. Having recently finished Dr. Barber's Authentic Assessment course, this assignment was built upon my previous research in assessing student achievement. Using Lombardi (2008) and Vincent's (2006) research on authentic learning and assessment in the 21st-century as a springboard, the slideshow explains new assessment practices, as well as a lengthy case study of such practices in an inner-city New York school.
Artifact Seven: New Modes of Assessment Slideshow
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