Inquiry Project: Assessment and progression: How can we change assessment to better a student's motivation towards academics

Assessment and Motivation

Formative assessment techniques to support student motivation and achievement

Kathleen Cauley, James Mcmillan (2010)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00098650903267784

Assessment effects student motivation. The paper covers five key practices teachers can use to gather information about student understanding providing feedback and enable students to set and attain learning goals. The key parts are a cycle. It can begin from student’s motivation, to student engagement, work, and achievement, to ongoing assessment, feedback, and then instructional correctives by teachers and students. Support is important to keep student’s motivation and goal towards their achievements. Supporting students promotes improvement and progress, which provides students to adopt learning mastery goals.

Classroom Assessment, student motivation, and achievement in high school social studies classes

 Susan Brookhart, Daniel Durkin(2003)

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248940582_Classroom_Assessment_Student_Motivation_and_Achievement_in_High_School_Social_Studies_Classes

Four assessments in each course from a teacher-researchers teaching load were sampled. Sample sizes was about 96 students. It was found that student performance assessments were connected to productive student’s goal orientations and earning strategies. Students were interviewed and valued the sharing and learning of ideas from their colleagues. Group motivation spurs the idea for team based learning, and group assessment instead of individual assessment.

Standards Based Grading

Grading for Understanding – Standards Based Grading

Tod Zimmerman (2017)

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1124208

Standards based grading is about “Mastering learning objectives” rather than “earning points”. Mistakes are apart of the learning process, much like how to learn a game is to play, learn, and practice. They should be rewarded for trying to fix their past mistakes, not for attempting it once and accepting their fate. Reassessment is practice, and practice is a form of learning. Grades should be determined by the number of learning objectives completed by the end of the semester.

Questioning points and percentages: Standards-based Grading in Higher Education

 Tom Buckmiller, Randal Peters, Jerrid Kruse

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/87567555.2017.1302919?journalCode=vcol20

Standard based grading (SBG) case used in university. Grading practices in university tend to be traditional and commonly used world wide. Again, students thought of schooling as just earning points like a game and that is the end goal, not to learn course content. Students that worked under an SBG took ownership of their learning. SBG provides an opportunity for students to reflect on their previous knowledge.

The standards for academics’ standards-based assessment practices

 Dennis Alonzo, Negin Mirriahi, and Chris Davison (2018)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02602938.2018.1521373?journalCode=caeh20

There has been a need for improving learning and teaching. The paper developed a tool based on evidence from literature. Using their tool and a sample of 410 students who wanted to engage in self assessment, they found a “Six Factor Model” that was “most parsimonious among other models”. The framework is based on Standard based grading, and I think It would be interesting to do a deeper analysis of their paper.

Peer Assessment

Peer Assessment

Kieth J. Topping (2009)

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234718247_Peer_Assessment

Peer assessment provides evaluation levels from equal status learners. Students can learn different perspectives of mistakes by exploring each others’ understandings. Writing, oral presentations, portfolios, testing performance are all possible methods for students to evaluate. The paper mainly covers formative assessment but also states that assessment could be summative as well, so it does encourage to investigate other assessment methods. Formative assessment using a peer to peer method also helps develop personal and professional skills, as students will find it challenging to verbally explain their understanding. I find it a great learning method to be able to teach your understandings to your colleagues.

Peer Learning and Assessment

David Boud (1999)

To assist with course content, students meeting in groups can help teach a variety of learning outcomes. Collaboration with others can deepen their understanding. Also studying with colleagues can develop their responsibility for their own education. The abstract acknowledges a problem of traditional grading methods, as it values individual achievement, and collaborative efforts is akin to cheating. Inappropriate assessment practices also form competition and prevent a more supportive learning environment, which is what modern educational curriculums are leaning towards.

Peer feedback: the learning element of peer Assessment

Ngar-fun Liu & David Carless (2006)

https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600680582

Paper investigates the relation of peer feedback and the assessment process. Studying the student rational can be used to enhance student learning. What is most fascinating is students resist peer assessment using grades and rarely assess each other. The paper goes deeper into why students resist the peer assessment process. It also covers strategies for promoting peer feedback and encouraging students to be more engaging with peer to the peer to peer learning experience. However, if the classrooms and learning cultures value individual achievement over collaborative approaches, the peer-to-peer learning and assessment may not be effective. 

Creative thinking, and assessment

"The role of observation is to seed thinking'

During my short practicum I was given the opportunity to teach about endothermic and exothermic reactions. When I made the lab report for the students to follow I only wanted them to observe what happens when the reaction begins. Qualitative observations were the most important part about this lab. To me, the seed is change. What changes are happening that we are able to observe. I think change can have lots of different perspectives and opinions. The thought process of someone that is beginning to learn compared to someone that has a deeper though process is vastly different. Assessment could be based on the growth of an individual, on the dedication students put into the content to learn. Students will change through time and there is such a think as early and late bloomers. If a teacher can facilitate a students interest in change instead of aiming for an answer, it could change the way people approach learning.

"In the early stages. words can kill. They label, making things familiar, and make the world safe again"

Labeling is to name with absolute certainty that they know what an idea is. It is satisfying to say that we know that something is 100%, but that causes a problem, it leaves no room for forward thinking or different ideas. No room for change, or the possibility that it could be something else. I think it is still important to observe the known, and to be curious about it. To experience the same experience other researchers did and draw similar conclusions is to learn. I think it would be analogous to reading about the Grand Canyon and studying it, compared to being there and seeing it. I think its exciting to challenge older theories, or to want to find another method to another solution. There does not always need to be one definitive right method. I think to label early on is to stop any kind of inquiry. This is not to say the process is wrong, but to observe the world requires some creativity at observing it. Nature it self is very creative, and to study and learn it requires a lot of growth. Art can have deeper meaning  and draw emotions of we were to study the brushwork or the paints used and to be able to see what kind of difficulties the artist confronted when making art. I would like to think science does this too.

"Our problems are caused by our efforts to deal with the problem. The more we throw ourselves at it, the worse it gets. "

I think I would have appreciated this quote in my first degree. Approaching difficult things can tunnel vision us into imagining what the problem actually is. At times its simpler then we believe it is, but we tend to want to find that there is something complicated that we are missing. There is a want that the problem is something that we do not know, or something that is difficult that we are missing out on when reality, we may have just wrote the problem down incorrectly. During the practicum I observed many students during tutorials before retesting dates. Most of the time it was silly mistakes such as not noticing the Y axis of the graphs were different, or they copied the problem from the chalk board wrong, or even trying to balance an equation thinking only the products can change. I learned and read into standard based grading, and I would like to think that it is a good solution for students to correct any mistakes they have made in the past. Each quiz/test can be split into standards that should be known for the course. Students can do great in some, but poorly on others. During tutorials, lunch, and after school they can correct the mistakes and retest on those specific areas instead of re writing an entire test. It seems much more accurate as well since students will know what specific area they are getting incorrect.