Wrapping up Assessment & Evaluation
This semester, I had the privilege of teaching a graduate course in Assessment, Evaluation and Criteria of quality for the second time. The learners were all art education MAT students. Early in the semester, we established a need on their part for a heavy integration of research skills into the course. From my perspective, this is a perfect match, since very similar skills are required for assessment and evaluation, as are required for pure research.
The only complaint I have about the course is that I find it very difficult to include both assessment and evaluation into only one course. On the assessment part, students expect to spend a lot of time discussing classroom assessment and developing skills in the classroom. It takes a lot of time and discussion to help students develop a vocabularly to discuss assessment in the terms that educational researchers and assessment-savvy educators use. Then suddenly, bam-- let's switch to program evaluation. Yes, in one sense it's a micro to macro perspective, but I always feel like the evaluation portion is rushed.
The best part of the class is that it was very hands-on. Most of the students currently teach, so the project for formative assessment was for them to conduct action research whereby they thoughtfully integrated a formative assessment strategy into their classroom practice and reflected on the results and noted how it would impact their future practice. For the students who are not teachers, they did an inquiry into the assessment practices of someone who is currently teaching through interviews and observation.
Instructors should have aha moments too. My aha moment over the course of the semester and in tandem with my own work which is increasingly heavily assessment-oriented was that feedback is at the center of instructional practice. While some instructors understand this intuitively, others are not aware of how crucial it is. One of the students in the class, who teaches in an informal setting (thus making assessment that much more challenging) simply changed up the introduction to the lesson in a way that required the kids she was working with to reflect on what they were creating. Simply adding a question can radically change an entire lesson and the way someone else is thinking about their own work. That's powerful.
