Assignment 5.1: The Assessment Plan

INTRODUCTION

The goal of this assignment is to challenge you to think like an assessment designer and also to round out your ed tech pitch to include some useful tools to measure progress. You will get to use your own project as a context for figuring out how best to measure learning gains, engagement, or the skills you’ve decided to teach.

WHAT TO DO

Refine Your Learning Goals
First, take some time to develop your ideas for your pitch by revisiting and refining your learning objectives. What specifically are your learning goals for your product?  Why are those your goals? Write them out in a bulleted list that you can refer back to.
Design Your Assessments
Next, think about the assessment piece. How will you know that learners have reached those goals, or if they are headed in the right direction? Is there evidence that comes from data captured by the technology itself, or are there external tools of some kind which capture data from users? Figure out what form your assessment will take.
You want to be confident that collecting that information will really be indicative of a student’s progress. Assessments for foreign language vocabulary, math practices, or grit could look very different from each other, so make sure the format is appropriate to what you’re trying to measure. Also remember the differences between formative, summative, and performance assessments and design something that serves its purpose well. Don’t be afraid to have multiple types of assessment to get at these various aspects.
As an example, an immersive game for language learning might capture mouse clicks to see how many people the user talks to, thereby measuring persistence. It could use an intelligent agent who interviews the student to assess transfer of grammar patterns. And it may also analyze chat logs to continually gather formative data on vocabulary usage. Each type of assessment serves a purpose of measuring a stated learning goal, and they work together to provide a bigger picture of the learner’s progress.
Display Your Data
Lastly, think about to whom your data is useful and for what purpose. Is it for a teacher to assign a grade, a parent to support learning at home, or the student herself to be aware of progress made? Depending on the audience and uses, decide on a delivery format. This might be one synthesized score, a large data table, or a narrative comment, and it would almost certainly vary depending on the content of each assessment you’re building in. This course is about innovative technologies so don’t be afraid to get creative in your approach!

DELIVERY FORMAT

Your work will consist of (at least) two parts. You may also want to link to your previously posted project description for people that need background on what your educational technology is all about.

• One part is a writeup describing your Assessment Plan. This will list the learning goals and describe each measure you are using, how it collects data, what content or skills it measures, and how it’s useful.
• The other is a mockup of the data display for each measure you are using. Specify who the audience is and create an image of the tables, text, or visuals that will convey the assessment results. Examples can be found on the next page.

Share (External resource)

You will again post your work in the forums to gather feedback from your peers. Ideally you would be able to give feedback on some of the same projects you’ve reviewed before. That way you can think about how well the assessments fit an intervention you’re already familiar with. From the forum homepage, go to Week 5 then find the "Assessment Plan" discussion.

Launch 11.132x Forums

FEEDBACK CRITERIA

Although there is no need for a formal rubric in this assignment, these are the areas you should evaluate and respond to for each assessment plan you review:

• Are the learning goals laid out clearly?
• Are the assessments thoughtfully designed to get at each learning goal?
• Will the displayed data be easy to use and informative for the stakeholders?
• Can a stakeholder get a full picture of how the learner is doing and where they may need support?
• Are the proposed assessments more traditional or innovative in their design? What are the benefits and drawbacks of that choice?

DUE DATE

Technically the only due date is to submit this assignment by the end of the course. However, to get the benefit of peer feedback, we strongly suggest you submit it by the end of Week 5: November 18th. After that time the majority of course participants will be moving on to Week 6 work and won't be focused on this specific topic.