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I've been looking into how Blogger handles trackback. Sigh, Blogger doesn't do it, it uses a slower "linkback" technology. But its not clear that linkback from Blogger to other blogs ever happens. Resulting in no conversation between blogs, where the point of blogging is to foster conversation. As a result, we are moving the CTLT blog to Wordpress hosting where trackback/pingback is real.
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Showing posts with label assessment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label assessment. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Graphing Multidimensional Data for Learning
We are moving out of Blogger. Please link and comment on this post in our Wordpress blog.
Nils Peterson, Theron DesRosier, Jayme Jacobson
This post is in a series exploring issues related to transforming the grade book. Most recently we have been developing elements of the implementation of these ideas, and have been asking if it is credible that students and faculty and academic programs could learn from this data.
Below is a rendering of data previously collected in a rating session on a self-reflection document created by student employees as part of their job performance review. This study was done in collaboration between the WSU Career Center and our office. The rubric had five dimensions, and the scale ranged from 1 to 6, 6 being highest, 4 being competent. Three groups were involved in the rating: students (peers), faculty and external employers. The employers were recruiters from major companies in Washington state, who were on campus as part of their student recruiting work.
(click to enlarge image)
The five dimensions of the rubric are plotted in this radar graph with each dimension having its origin in the center of the pentagon and its highest possible value at the outer edge. The three groups of raters are shown as colored regions. This diagram shows a familiar story: students rate peers more highly than faculty and employers think the least highly of student abilities. The diagram also shows that in teamwork and communication each group agrees students are underprepared (vertices which are below competency). In Mission, students think they are competent while others disagree. In use of Evidence, faculty and students each think students are prepared, but employers disagree. Only in Duties do all three groups agree that students are prepared.
Nils Peterson, Theron DesRosier, Jayme Jacobson
This post is in a series exploring issues related to transforming the grade book. Most recently we have been developing elements of the implementation of these ideas, and have been asking if it is credible that students and faculty and academic programs could learn from this data.
Below is a rendering of data previously collected in a rating session on a self-reflection document created by student employees as part of their job performance review. This study was done in collaboration between the WSU Career Center and our office. The rubric had five dimensions, and the scale ranged from 1 to 6, 6 being highest, 4 being competent. Three groups were involved in the rating: students (peers), faculty and external employers. The employers were recruiters from major companies in Washington state, who were on campus as part of their student recruiting work.
(click to enlarge image)The five dimensions of the rubric are plotted in this radar graph with each dimension having its origin in the center of the pentagon and its highest possible value at the outer edge. The three groups of raters are shown as colored regions. This diagram shows a familiar story: students rate peers more highly than faculty and employers think the least highly of student abilities. The diagram also shows that in teamwork and communication each group agrees students are underprepared (vertices which are below competency). In Mission, students think they are competent while others disagree. In use of Evidence, faculty and students each think students are prepared, but employers disagree. Only in Duties do all three groups agree that students are prepared.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Authentic assessment of learning in global contexts
We are moving out of Blogger. Please link and comment to this post in our Wordpress blog.
Nils Peterson, Gary Brown, Jayme Jacobson, Theron DesRosier
The AAC&U 2009 conference, Global Challenge, College Learning, and America’s Promise asks a series of questions about “the relationship between college learning and society” and the Call for Proposal notes “[College and university] failure to fully engage our publics with the kinds of learning best suited to our current needs…”
The following is an abstract submitted in response to the Call above. It served as an opportunity to “rise above” our work on these topics and reflect on its implications.
---
Assessment of learning by a community inside and outside the classroom is a key component to developing students’ global competencies and building a strong relationship between college learning and society.
In 2007-08 Washington State University conducted an ePortfolio Contest to demonstrate ways to harness the interests and expertise of the WSU community to address real world problems encountered by communities both locally and globally. It called upon contestants to collaborate with community members - institutional, local, or global – to identify a problem, explore solutions, develop a plan, and then take steps toward implementing that plan. Contestants were asked to use electronic portfolios to capture and reflect on their collaborative problem-solving processes and the impact of their projects. Judges from industry, the local community, and WSU used a rubric based on the WSU Critical Thinking Rubric to evaluate the portfolios. Since the contest, we have been distilling design principles for portfolios that facilitate learning.
This exploration has taught us to value the learner consciously leaving a ‘learning trace’ as they work on a problem, and we believe the capturing and sharing of that trace is an important part of documenting learning. A striking example illustrating a learning trace in a portfolio is one of the winners in our contest. Not only does this portfolio exhibit a learning trace, it captures feedback from the community regarding the quality of the work. A recent AAC&U survey of employers supports this bias for richer documentation of learner skills.
Our thinking about portfolios for learning is moving us away from traditional ideas about courses contained in classrooms and toward Stephen Downes’ eLearning 2.0 ideas: “Students' [learning portfolios] are often about something from their own range of interests, rather than on a course topic or assigned project. More importantly, what happens when students [work in this way], is that a network of interactions forms-much like a social network, and much like Wenger's community of practice.” And far from being trivial social networking, our portfolio contest captured rich and substantive learning happening in the community outside the classroom.
But documentation of learning, without feedback, guidance and assessment leaves the learner to work without the support of a community, which has led us to a recognition that grade books are QWERTY artifacts of a Learning 1.0 model. To address that, we have been exploring ways to transform the grade book to support learners working simultaneously within the university and within their communities of practice. This approach to a grade book has the additional benefit for the scholarship of teaching and learning of gathering feedback on the assignment, course and program from the community at the same time that it invites the community to assess a learner’s work. Such feedback can help the university engage its publics in a discussion of the kinds of learning most suited to current needs.
The questions in the AAC&U Call will be used to help the audience highlight and frame the discussion of our ideas.
---
The Call “invites proposals of substantive, engaging sessions that will raise provocative questions, that will engage participants in discussion, and that will create and encourage dialogue--before, during, and after the conference itself.”
In the spirit of the AAC&U call, you are invited to engage this discussion before or after the conference by posting comments here, on the related pages, or by tracking back from your own blog, and then meet us in Seattle to further the conversation.
Nils Peterson, Gary Brown, Jayme Jacobson, Theron DesRosier
The AAC&U 2009 conference, Global Challenge, College Learning, and America’s Promise asks a series of questions about “the relationship between college learning and society” and the Call for Proposal notes “[College and university] failure to fully engage our publics with the kinds of learning best suited to our current needs…”
The following is an abstract submitted in response to the Call above. It served as an opportunity to “rise above” our work on these topics and reflect on its implications.
---
Assessment of learning by a community inside and outside the classroom is a key component to developing students’ global competencies and building a strong relationship between college learning and society.
In 2007-08 Washington State University conducted an ePortfolio Contest to demonstrate ways to harness the interests and expertise of the WSU community to address real world problems encountered by communities both locally and globally. It called upon contestants to collaborate with community members - institutional, local, or global – to identify a problem, explore solutions, develop a plan, and then take steps toward implementing that plan. Contestants were asked to use electronic portfolios to capture and reflect on their collaborative problem-solving processes and the impact of their projects. Judges from industry, the local community, and WSU used a rubric based on the WSU Critical Thinking Rubric to evaluate the portfolios. Since the contest, we have been distilling design principles for portfolios that facilitate learning.
This exploration has taught us to value the learner consciously leaving a ‘learning trace’ as they work on a problem, and we believe the capturing and sharing of that trace is an important part of documenting learning. A striking example illustrating a learning trace in a portfolio is one of the winners in our contest. Not only does this portfolio exhibit a learning trace, it captures feedback from the community regarding the quality of the work. A recent AAC&U survey of employers supports this bias for richer documentation of learner skills.
Our thinking about portfolios for learning is moving us away from traditional ideas about courses contained in classrooms and toward Stephen Downes’ eLearning 2.0 ideas: “Students' [learning portfolios] are often about something from their own range of interests, rather than on a course topic or assigned project. More importantly, what happens when students [work in this way], is that a network of interactions forms-much like a social network, and much like Wenger's community of practice.” And far from being trivial social networking, our portfolio contest captured rich and substantive learning happening in the community outside the classroom.
But documentation of learning, without feedback, guidance and assessment leaves the learner to work without the support of a community, which has led us to a recognition that grade books are QWERTY artifacts of a Learning 1.0 model. To address that, we have been exploring ways to transform the grade book to support learners working simultaneously within the university and within their communities of practice. This approach to a grade book has the additional benefit for the scholarship of teaching and learning of gathering feedback on the assignment, course and program from the community at the same time that it invites the community to assess a learner’s work. Such feedback can help the university engage its publics in a discussion of the kinds of learning most suited to current needs.
The questions in the AAC&U Call will be used to help the audience highlight and frame the discussion of our ideas.
---
The Call “invites proposals of substantive, engaging sessions that will raise provocative questions, that will engage participants in discussion, and that will create and encourage dialogue--before, during, and after the conference itself.”
In the spirit of the AAC&U call, you are invited to engage this discussion before or after the conference by posting comments here, on the related pages, or by tracking back from your own blog, and then meet us in Seattle to further the conversation.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Implementing the Transformed Grade Book II
We are leaving Blogger for Wordpress, please join us there.
Jayme Jacobson, Theron DesRosier, Nils Peterson with help from Jack Wacknitz
Previously we showed examples of how a transformed grade book (or Harvesting grade book ) might look from the perspective of a piece of student work seeking feedback. That demonstration was hand built and is not practical to scale up to the level of an academic program. Even the smaller scale use such as that suggested by a recent piece in the Chronicle entitled Portfolios Are Replacing Qualifying Exams would benefit from some automation. This post outlines a design for a software application that could plug into the Skylight Matrix Survey System (a new survey tool WSU is developing).
There are two workflows that we have previously described in general terms, one for the instructor to register assignments and another for students to request feedback as they work on those assignments. In the figure below we outline a series of screen shots for the instructor registering the assignment. During the registration process the instructor is matching the assignment to the assessment rubric dimensions that are appropriate. We view this registration of the assessments as a possible implementation of Stephen Downes’ idea in Open Source Assessment.
Instructor Dashboard (click image to enlarge)
This examples shows how an instructor might use a dashboard to register and monitor assignments. The workflow shows capturing the assignment, assigning rubric dimensions to be used for assessing both the student work and the assignment itself and ends with routing the assignment for review. This mock-up does not show how the instructor would see the student work created in response to the assignment, or the scores associated with that student work . The next step in the workflow would require an upload of the assignment so that it could be retained in a program-level archive. The assignment could be referenced from that archive for faculty scholarship of teaching (SoTL), as well as for program or accreditation review and other administrative purposes.
Once the assignment has been registered, the student could start from a student dashboard to request a review or feedback and guidance. We are differentiating the idea of a full review (with a rubric) from more informal feedback and guidance. This informal feedback would probably not be fed into a grade book but the captured feedback could be used by a student as evidence in a learning portfolio.
Student Dashboard (click image to enlarge)
The basic workflow for a student would let the student request a rubric-based review for a specific assignment in a specific course. The student would select the course, assignment, and other metadata. Once posted for review, the request would either be routed to multiple reviewers or the student would embed the review into a webpage using the HTML code provided. In the second step there would be an opportunity to upload a document. This might be used in cases where the document had no web incarnation (to give it a URL) or to “turn-in” a copy of the document that would not be subject to further editing, as might be required in some high-stakes assessments.
The Learning 2.0 model is supported in the last step, where the assessment is embedded in a web space still open to modification by the learner (as the previous examples illustrated)
Student-created Rubric-based Survey (click image to enlarge)
Students might want to use their own rubric-based surveys. This mock-up shows how workflow would branch from the previous workflow to allow the student to define rubric dimensions and criteria.
Student-created Simple Feedback Survey (click image to enlarge)
This last example shows how the student would create a simple feedback survey.
State of the Art
Presently there are several tools that might be used to deliver a rubric survey. The challenge is the amount of handwork implied to let each student have a rubric survey for each assignment in each course and to aggregate the data from those surveys by assignment, by course, and by student for reporting. A future post will explore what might be learned by having the data centrally aggregated. If there is value in central aggregation, it will have implications for the tool and method selected for the rubric survey delivery. The Center for Teaching Learning and Technology at WSU already has tools to make the handwork implied tractable for use in a pilot course of 20-30 students. We understand the path to develop further automation, but both pilot test and further automation require investment which requires further analysis of commitment, infrastructure, and resources.
Questions
1. Can this concept provide transformative assessment data that can be used by students, instructors, and programs to advance learning? In addition to assessing student learning, can it provide data for instructor course evaluation and for program level assessment and accreditation?
2. Can the process be made simple enough to be non-obtrusive in terms of overhead in a course’s operations?
3. Is it necessary to implement a feedback and guidance as a central university-hosted tool, or could students implement an adequate solution without more investment on the university's part?
Jayme Jacobson, Theron DesRosier, Nils Peterson with help from Jack Wacknitz
Previously we showed examples of how a transformed grade book (or Harvesting grade book ) might look from the perspective of a piece of student work seeking feedback. That demonstration was hand built and is not practical to scale up to the level of an academic program. Even the smaller scale use such as that suggested by a recent piece in the Chronicle entitled Portfolios Are Replacing Qualifying Exams would benefit from some automation. This post outlines a design for a software application that could plug into the Skylight Matrix Survey System (a new survey tool WSU is developing).
There are two workflows that we have previously described in general terms, one for the instructor to register assignments and another for students to request feedback as they work on those assignments. In the figure below we outline a series of screen shots for the instructor registering the assignment. During the registration process the instructor is matching the assignment to the assessment rubric dimensions that are appropriate. We view this registration of the assessments as a possible implementation of Stephen Downes’ idea in Open Source Assessment.
Instructor Dashboard (click image to enlarge)
This examples shows how an instructor might use a dashboard to register and monitor assignments. The workflow shows capturing the assignment, assigning rubric dimensions to be used for assessing both the student work and the assignment itself and ends with routing the assignment for review. This mock-up does not show how the instructor would see the student work created in response to the assignment, or the scores associated with that student work . The next step in the workflow would require an upload of the assignment so that it could be retained in a program-level archive. The assignment could be referenced from that archive for faculty scholarship of teaching (SoTL), as well as for program or accreditation review and other administrative purposes.
Once the assignment has been registered, the student could start from a student dashboard to request a review or feedback and guidance. We are differentiating the idea of a full review (with a rubric) from more informal feedback and guidance. This informal feedback would probably not be fed into a grade book but the captured feedback could be used by a student as evidence in a learning portfolio.
Student Dashboard (click image to enlarge)
The basic workflow for a student would let the student request a rubric-based review for a specific assignment in a specific course. The student would select the course, assignment, and other metadata. Once posted for review, the request would either be routed to multiple reviewers or the student would embed the review into a webpage using the HTML code provided. In the second step there would be an opportunity to upload a document. This might be used in cases where the document had no web incarnation (to give it a URL) or to “turn-in” a copy of the document that would not be subject to further editing, as might be required in some high-stakes assessments.
The Learning 2.0 model is supported in the last step, where the assessment is embedded in a web space still open to modification by the learner (as the previous examples illustrated)
Student-created Rubric-based Survey (click image to enlarge)
Students might want to use their own rubric-based surveys. This mock-up shows how workflow would branch from the previous workflow to allow the student to define rubric dimensions and criteria.Student-created Simple Feedback Survey (click image to enlarge)
This last example shows how the student would create a simple feedback survey.State of the Art
Presently there are several tools that might be used to deliver a rubric survey. The challenge is the amount of handwork implied to let each student have a rubric survey for each assignment in each course and to aggregate the data from those surveys by assignment, by course, and by student for reporting. A future post will explore what might be learned by having the data centrally aggregated. If there is value in central aggregation, it will have implications for the tool and method selected for the rubric survey delivery. The Center for Teaching Learning and Technology at WSU already has tools to make the handwork implied tractable for use in a pilot course of 20-30 students. We understand the path to develop further automation, but both pilot test and further automation require investment which requires further analysis of commitment, infrastructure, and resources.
Questions
1. Can this concept provide transformative assessment data that can be used by students, instructors, and programs to advance learning? In addition to assessing student learning, can it provide data for instructor course evaluation and for program level assessment and accreditation?
2. Can the process be made simple enough to be non-obtrusive in terms of overhead in a course’s operations?
3. Is it necessary to implement a feedback and guidance as a central university-hosted tool, or could students implement an adequate solution without more investment on the university's part?
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Implementing Feedback and Guidance
Previously we (Theron DesRosier, Jayme Jacobson, and I) wrote about implementing our ideas for a transformed grade book. The next step in that discussion was to think about how to render the data. Our question was, “How do we render this data so that the learner can learn from it?”
We’ve been spending time with Grant Wiggins’ Assessing Student Performance, Jossey-Bass, 1993. In Chapter 6 on Feedback, he differentiates ‘feedback’ from ‘guidance’ in several examples and defines feedback as “information that provides the performer with direct, usable insights into current performance, based on tangible differences between current performance and hoped-for performance.”
Wiggins describes ‘guidance’ as looking forward, the roadmap to follow to my goal and ‘feedback’ as looking backward, did my last action keep me on the road or steer me off?
Wiggins points to Peter Elbow, Embracing Contraries and Explorations in Learning and Teaching, “The unspoken premise that permeates much of education is that every performance must be measured and that the most important response to a performance is to measure it.” Both authors go on to suggest that less measurement is needed, and that feedback is the important (often missing) element to substitute for measurement.
Our previous posts on the transformed grade book are designed to be a measurement strategy (that we hoped would also provide feedback to learners), but Wiggins leads me to think that learners need a feedback tool different from a measurement tool (used to populate the grade book).
While bloggers have some experience getting feedback from the blogosphere by informal means, I think that it would be useful to scaffold requesting feedback, for both learners and feedback givers. However, I want the process to be simple and fast for both parties. What I hope to avoid is the too common tendency of student peers to give trite “great job” reviews, or to fall into reviewing mechanical things, such as looking for spelling errors.
To that end, I am exploring a simplified approach from the idea in the last post. Recently, I tried a version of this simple idea in an email to Gary Brown (our director). He had asked me for a report on LMS costs to be shared with a campus committee. I replied with the report and this:
Implicit in the feedback request was my goal of meeting his needs.
Even with this simple feedback + guidance request the question remains, can we render the data that would be collected in a way the learner could learn from it? Below is a hypothetical graph of multiple events (draft and final documents) where I asked Gary for feedback: “Is this useful?” The series makes evident to me (the learner) that initially the feedback I’m getting is not very affirming, and final versions don’t fair much better than drafts. Reflecting on this I have a heart-to-heart talk and afterwards develop a new strategy that improves my feedback results.
Versions of this kind of “Was this helpful?” feedback appear on some online help resources, and I assume that someone is reviewing the feedback and updating the help pages, and could produce graphs similar to the one above, showing improved feedback after specific interventions.
Here is Google's feedback request from a help page found from a Google App:
When you choose the Yes or No feedback, another question appears, and in this case you are giving guidance on what would make the item better, either picking a guidance from a list or providing an open-ended reply.
In addition to comments or trackbacks, please give me feedback and guidance on this post (my form is not as slick as Google's).
We’ve been spending time with Grant Wiggins’ Assessing Student Performance, Jossey-Bass, 1993. In Chapter 6 on Feedback, he differentiates ‘feedback’ from ‘guidance’ in several examples and defines feedback as “information that provides the performer with direct, usable insights into current performance, based on tangible differences between current performance and hoped-for performance.”
Wiggins describes ‘guidance’ as looking forward, the roadmap to follow to my goal and ‘feedback’ as looking backward, did my last action keep me on the road or steer me off?
Wiggins points to Peter Elbow, Embracing Contraries and Explorations in Learning and Teaching, “The unspoken premise that permeates much of education is that every performance must be measured and that the most important response to a performance is to measure it.” Both authors go on to suggest that less measurement is needed, and that feedback is the important (often missing) element to substitute for measurement.
Our previous posts on the transformed grade book are designed to be a measurement strategy (that we hoped would also provide feedback to learners), but Wiggins leads me to think that learners need a feedback tool different from a measurement tool (used to populate the grade book).
While bloggers have some experience getting feedback from the blogosphere by informal means, I think that it would be useful to scaffold requesting feedback, for both learners and feedback givers. However, I want the process to be simple and fast for both parties. What I hope to avoid is the too common tendency of student peers to give trite “great job” reviews, or to fall into reviewing mechanical things, such as looking for spelling errors.
To that end, I am exploring a simplified approach from the idea in the last post. Recently, I tried a version of this simple idea in an email to Gary Brown (our director). He had asked me for a report on LMS costs to be shared with a campus committee. I replied with the report and this:
Feedback request: Is this going to meet your needs for the LMS committee? (Yes/somewhat/no)
Guidance request: what additional issues would you like considered?
Implicit in the feedback request was my goal of meeting his needs.
Even with this simple feedback + guidance request the question remains, can we render the data that would be collected in a way the learner could learn from it? Below is a hypothetical graph of multiple events (draft and final documents) where I asked Gary for feedback: “Is this useful?” The series makes evident to me (the learner) that initially the feedback I’m getting is not very affirming, and final versions don’t fair much better than drafts. Reflecting on this I have a heart-to-heart talk and afterwards develop a new strategy that improves my feedback results.
Versions of this kind of “Was this helpful?” feedback appear on some online help resources, and I assume that someone is reviewing the feedback and updating the help pages, and could produce graphs similar to the one above, showing improved feedback after specific interventions.
Here is Google's feedback request from a help page found from a Google App:
When you choose the Yes or No feedback, another question appears, and in this case you are giving guidance on what would make the item better, either picking a guidance from a list or providing an open-ended reply.In addition to comments or trackbacks, please give me feedback and guidance on this post (my form is not as slick as Google's).
Friday, June 20, 2008
Implementing the Transformed Grade Book
Theron DesRosier, Jayme Jacobson, Nils Peterson
Previously we described ideas on Transforming the Grade Book, by way of elaborating on Gary Brown’s ideas of a “Harvesting Gradebook.”
Here we demonstrate an implementation of those ideas in the form of a website with student work and embedded assessment. This demonstration is implemented in Microsoft SharePoint with the WSU Critical and Integrative Thinking rubric as the criteria and a Google Doc survey as the data collection vehicle, but other platforms could be used to contain the student work and other assessment rubrics delivered in other survey tools could be developed. (Note- this implementation is built with baling wire and duct tape and the implementation would not scale.)
There are four examples of student work (a Word document with track changes, a blog post, a wiki diff and an email), to illustrate the variety of student work that might be collected and the variety of contexts in which students might be working. This student work might be organized as part of an institutionally sponsored hub-and-spoke style LMS or in an institutionally sponsored ePortfolio (as WSU is doing with SharePoint mySites) or directly in venues controlled by the student (see for example the blog and email examples below) where the student embeds a link to the grade book provided by the academic program.
Examples of Assessing Student Work (aka transformed ‘grading’)
The first example is a Microsoft Word document, stored in SharePoint, and included in this page with Document Viewer web part. You are seeing the track changes and comments in the Word document. In some browsers you will see pop-up notes and the identities of the reviewers.
To the right of the document is the rubric for assessing the work. Clicking on “Expand” in the rubric will open a new window with details of the rubric dimension and a Google Doc survey where you can enter a numeric score and comments of your assessment of the work with this criteria.
This survey also collects information about your role because it is important in our conceptualization of this transformed grade book to have multiple perspectives and to be able to analyze feedback based on its source.
In our description of the workflow that for this assessment process we say:
Finally, as an effort in ongoing improvement of the assessment instrument itself, the survey asks for information about the learning outcome, its description and relevance, with the assumption that the rubric is open for revision over time.
In this demo, you can complete the survey and submit data, but your data will not be visible in later parts of the demo. Rather, specific data for demonstration purposes will be presented elsewhere.
The second example is a blog post, in Blogger, included in the site with SharePoint’s Page Viewer web part. Again, to the right of the post is the rubric implemented in the form of a survey. With the Page Viewer web part the reviewer can navigate around the web from the blog post to see relevant linked items.
While this demonstration has embedded the blog post into a SharePoint site, that is not a requirement. The student could embed the rubric into the footer of the specific blog or in the margin of the whole blog. To demonstrate the former of these ideas, we have embedded a sample at the bottom of this post. Adding criterion-based feedback extends the power of comment and trackback already inherent in blogging.
The third example is a Wiki Diff, again included in the site with SharePoint’s Page Viewer web part. Again, to the right is a rubric implemented in the form of a survey.
The fourth example is an email the student wrote. This was embedded into the SharePoint site, but as with the blog example, the author could have included a link to criterion-based review as part of the footer of the email.
A subsequent post will address visualization of this data by the student, the instructor, and the academic program.
Please use the rubric below to give us feedback on this work:
Previously we described ideas on Transforming the Grade Book, by way of elaborating on Gary Brown’s ideas of a “Harvesting Gradebook.”
Here we demonstrate an implementation of those ideas in the form of a website with student work and embedded assessment. This demonstration is implemented in Microsoft SharePoint with the WSU Critical and Integrative Thinking rubric as the criteria and a Google Doc survey as the data collection vehicle, but other platforms could be used to contain the student work and other assessment rubrics delivered in other survey tools could be developed. (Note- this implementation is built with baling wire and duct tape and the implementation would not scale.)
There are four examples of student work (a Word document with track changes, a blog post, a wiki diff and an email), to illustrate the variety of student work that might be collected and the variety of contexts in which students might be working. This student work might be organized as part of an institutionally sponsored hub-and-spoke style LMS or in an institutionally sponsored ePortfolio (as WSU is doing with SharePoint mySites) or directly in venues controlled by the student (see for example the blog and email examples below) where the student embeds a link to the grade book provided by the academic program.
Examples of Assessing Student Work (aka transformed ‘grading’)
The first example is a Microsoft Word document, stored in SharePoint, and included in this page with Document Viewer web part. You are seeing the track changes and comments in the Word document. In some browsers you will see pop-up notes and the identities of the reviewers.
To the right of the document is the rubric for assessing the work. Clicking on “Expand” in the rubric will open a new window with details of the rubric dimension and a Google Doc survey where you can enter a numeric score and comments of your assessment of the work with this criteria.
This survey also collects information about your role because it is important in our conceptualization of this transformed grade book to have multiple perspectives and to be able to analyze feedback based on its source.
In our description of the workflow that for this assessment process we say:
Instructors start the process by defining assignments for their classes and “registering” them with the academic program. Various metadata are associated with the assignment in the registration process. Registration is important because in the end the process we propose will be able to link up student work, assessment of the work, the assignment that prompted the work, and assessments of the assignment.This demonstration shows one of the important impacts of the “registration” -- as a reviewer of the student's work, you can follow a link to see the assignment that generated this piece of student work, AND, you can then apply the assessment criteria to the assignment itself.
Finally, as an effort in ongoing improvement of the assessment instrument itself, the survey asks for information about the learning outcome, its description and relevance, with the assumption that the rubric is open for revision over time.
In this demo, you can complete the survey and submit data, but your data will not be visible in later parts of the demo. Rather, specific data for demonstration purposes will be presented elsewhere.
The second example is a blog post, in Blogger, included in the site with SharePoint’s Page Viewer web part. Again, to the right of the post is the rubric implemented in the form of a survey. With the Page Viewer web part the reviewer can navigate around the web from the blog post to see relevant linked items.
While this demonstration has embedded the blog post into a SharePoint site, that is not a requirement. The student could embed the rubric into the footer of the specific blog or in the margin of the whole blog. To demonstrate the former of these ideas, we have embedded a sample at the bottom of this post. Adding criterion-based feedback extends the power of comment and trackback already inherent in blogging.
The third example is a Wiki Diff, again included in the site with SharePoint’s Page Viewer web part. Again, to the right is a rubric implemented in the form of a survey.
The fourth example is an email the student wrote. This was embedded into the SharePoint site, but as with the blog example, the author could have included a link to criterion-based review as part of the footer of the email.
A subsequent post will address visualization of this data by the student, the instructor, and the academic program.
Please use the rubric below to give us feedback on this work:
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Transforming the Grade Book
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Nils Peterson, Theron Desrosier, Jayme Jacobson
CTLT has been thinking about portfolios for learning and their relationship to institutionally supported learning tools and course designs. This thinking has us moving away from the traditional LMS. It has also led to a recognition that grade books are QWERTY artifacts of Learning 1.0. In a recent Campus Technology interview Gary Brown introduced the term “harvesting gradebook” to describe the grade book that a faculty needs to work in these decentralized environments.
Figure 1: White board used for drafting these ideas. Black ink is “traditional” model, Blue is a first variation, Red is a second variation.
The process begins with a set of criteria that is agreed by to be useful by a community and is adopted across an academic program. An example is WSU’s Critical Thinking Rubric. This rubric was developed by the processes of a “traditional” academic community. How the process changes as the community changes will be discussed below.
Instructors start the process by defining assignments for their classes and “registering” them with the program. Various metadata are associated with the assignment in the registration process. Registration is important because in the end the process we propose will be able to link up student work, assessment of the work, the assignment that prompted the work, and assessments of the assignment. More implications of this registration will be seen below.
The student works the assignment and produces a solution in any number of media and venues, which might include the student’s ePortfolio (we define ePortfolio broadly). The student combines their work with the program’s rubric (in a survey format). The rubric survey is administered to either a specifically selected list of reviewers or to an ad hoc group. (We have been experimenting with two mechanisms for doing this “combining.” One places the rubric survey on the page with the student’s work as a sidebar or footer (analogous to a Comment feature, or the “Was this helpful?” survey included in some online resources). This approach is public to anyone who can access the web page. The other strategy imbeds a link to the student’s work in a survey, it can be targeted to a specific reviewer. This example comes from the judging CTLT’s 2nd ePortfolio contest.
In either case the survey collects a score and qualitative feedback for the student’s work. We are imagining the survey engine is centrally hosted so that all the data is compiled into a single location and therefore is accessible to the academic program. Data can be organized by student, assignment, academic term, or course. A tool we are developing that can do this is called Skylight Matrix Survey System, which is rebranded as Flashlight Online 2.0 by the TLT Group. The important properties of Skylight for this application are the ability to render a rubric question type and the ability to have many survey instances (respondent pools) within one survey and both report instances individually and aggregate the data across some/all the instances.
Audiences for this data
The transformative aspects of this strategy arise from the multiple audiences for the resulting data. We have labeled these collections of data, and the capacities to present the data to audiences “assessment necklaces”
Figure 2: Diagram of rubric-based assessment. Learners, peers, and faculty are shown collecting data from rubric-based assessment of portfolios, then reflecting on and presenting the multiple data points (necklaces) in contexts important to them.
Students can review the data for self-reflection and can use the data as evidence in a learning portfolio. We are exploring ideas like Google’s Motion Chart gadget (aka Trednalyzer/Gapminder) to help visualize this data over time. They can also learn from giving rubric-based reviews to peers and by comparing themselves to aggregates of peer data.
Instructors can use the data (probably presented in the student’s course portfolio) for “grading” in a course. It’s worth noting that the Instructor’s assignments can be assessed with the same rubric, asking, “To what extent does this assignment advance each the goals of this rubric?” With the assignment rated, instructors can review the data across multiple students, assignments, and semesters for their own scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Here the instructor can combine the rubric score of an assignment with the student performance on the assignment to improve the assignment. Instructors might also present this comparison data in a portfolio for more authentic teaching evaluations.
In this example the assignment might be rated by students or the instructor’s peers. Below, the rating of the assignment by wider communities will be explored.
Academic Programs can look across multiple courses and terms, for program-level learning outcomes and SoTL. They can also present the data in showcase portfolios used for recruiting students and faculty, funding and partners. This is where the collective registration of the assignment becomes important. The program can access the assignment in the context of the program, with an eye to coordinate assignments and courses to improve the coherence of the program outcomes.
The community, which might include accrediting bodies, employers and others, can use the data, as presented in portfolios by students, instructors, and the academic program, to reflect on, or give feedback to, the academic program. Over time, an important effect of this feedback should be to open dialogs that lead to changes in the rubric.
Variations on this model
The description above is still traditional in at least two important ways: the program (ie faculty) develop the rubric and the instructor decides the assignment. Variants are possible where outside interested parties participate in these activities.
First variation. WSU and University of Idaho run a joint program in Food Science. We have observed that the program enrolls a significant number of international students, from nations where food security is a pressing issue. We imagine that those nations view training food scientists as a national strategy for economic development.
We have imagined a model where the students (in conjunction with their sponsoring country), and interested NGOs, bring problem statements to the program and the program designs itself so that students are working on aspects of their problem while studying. The sponsors would also have an interest in the rubric, and students would be encouraged (required?) to maintain contacts with sponsors and NGOs and cultivate among them people to provide evaluations using the rubric.
The processes and activities described above would be similar, but the input from stakeholders would be more prominent than in the traditional university course. Review of the assignments, and decisions about the rubric, would be done within this wider community (two universities, national sponsors and NGOs). The review of assignments and the assessment of the relationship of assignments and learning products creates a very rich course evaluation, well beyond the satisfaction models presently used in traditional courses.
Second variation. This option opens the process up further and provides a model to implement Stephen Downes’ idea in Open Source Assessment. Downes says “were students given the opportunity to attempt the assessment, without the requirement that they sit through lectures or otherwise proprietary forms of learning, then they would create their own learning resources.”
In our idea of this model, the learner would come with the problem, or find a problem, and following Downes, learners would present aspects of their work to be evaluated with the program’s rubric, and the institution would credential the work based on its (and the community’s) judging of the problem/solution with the rubric. This sounds a lot like graduate education, the learner defines a problem of significance to a community and addresses that problem to the satisfaction of the community. In our proposed implementation, the ways that the community has access to the process are made more explicit.
In this variant, the decision about the rubric is an even broader community dialog and the assessment of the instructor (now mentor/learning coach) will be done by the community, both in terms of the skills demonstrated by students that the instructor mentored, and by the nature of the problems/approaches/solutions that were a result of the mentoring. The latter asks, is the instructor mentoring the student toward problems that are leading or lagging the thinking of the community?
Examples
For some sense of learning portfolios created by the processes above, consider these winners from CTLT’s 2007-08 ePortfolio contest.
The following two winners are examples of the second variant, where students were paired with a problem from a sponsor:
The Kayafungo Women’s Water Project documents the efforts of Engineers Without Borders at WSU (EWB@WSU) who partnered with the Student Movement for Real Change to provide clean water to 35,000 people in Kayafungo, Kenya.
The EEG Patient Monitoring Device portfolio follows the learning process of four MBA students who collaborated with faculty, the WSU Research Foundation, inventors, and engineers to develop a business plan for a wireless EEG patient monitoring device.
The next two are examples of the second variant -- student defined problems assessed by the community. In the latter case, the student is using the work, both her activism in the community and her study-in-action as her dissertation:
The Grace Foundation started with a vision to create a non-profit organization that would assist poor and disenfranchised communities across Nigeria in four areas: Education, Health, Entrepreneurship and Advocacy. The author used the UN online volunteering program to form a team to develop a participatory model of development that addresses issues of poverty eradication from a holistic manner.
El Calaboz Portfolio chronicles the use of Internet and media strategies by the Lipan Apache Women's Defense, a group that has grown in national and international prominence the last 75 days, from less than 10 people in August, to an e-organization of over 312 individuals currently working collectively. It now includes NGO leaders, tribal leaders, media experts, environmentalists, artists, and lawyers from the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. It recently received official organization status at the UN.
The next steps in this work at WSU are to build worked examples of these software tools and to recruit faculty partners to collaborate in a small scale pilot implementation.
Nils Peterson, Theron Desrosier, Jayme Jacobson
CTLT has been thinking about portfolios for learning and their relationship to institutionally supported learning tools and course designs. This thinking has us moving away from the traditional LMS. It has also led to a recognition that grade books are QWERTY artifacts of Learning 1.0. In a recent Campus Technology interview Gary Brown introduced the term “harvesting gradebook” to describe the grade book that a faculty needs to work in these decentralized environments.
“Right now at WSU, one of the things we're developing in collaboration with Microsoft is a 'harvesting' gradebook. So as an instructor in an environment like this, my gradebook for you as a student has links to all the different things that are required of you in order for me to credit you for completing the work in my class. But you may have worked up one of the assignments in Flickr, another in Google Groups, another in Picasa, and another in a wiki.”This post will provide more definition and a potential implementation for this new kind of transformed grade book. It is the result of a conversation between Nils Peterson, Theron DesRosier and Jayme Jacobson diagrammed here.
The process begins with a set of criteria that is agreed by to be useful by a community and is adopted across an academic program. An example is WSU’s Critical Thinking Rubric. This rubric was developed by the processes of a “traditional” academic community. How the process changes as the community changes will be discussed below.
Instructors start the process by defining assignments for their classes and “registering” them with the program. Various metadata are associated with the assignment in the registration process. Registration is important because in the end the process we propose will be able to link up student work, assessment of the work, the assignment that prompted the work, and assessments of the assignment. More implications of this registration will be seen below.
The student works the assignment and produces a solution in any number of media and venues, which might include the student’s ePortfolio (we define ePortfolio broadly). The student combines their work with the program’s rubric (in a survey format). The rubric survey is administered to either a specifically selected list of reviewers or to an ad hoc group. (We have been experimenting with two mechanisms for doing this “combining.” One places the rubric survey on the page with the student’s work as a sidebar or footer (analogous to a Comment feature, or the “Was this helpful?” survey included in some online resources). This approach is public to anyone who can access the web page. The other strategy imbeds a link to the student’s work in a survey, it can be targeted to a specific reviewer. This example comes from the judging CTLT’s 2nd ePortfolio contest.
In either case the survey collects a score and qualitative feedback for the student’s work. We are imagining the survey engine is centrally hosted so that all the data is compiled into a single location and therefore is accessible to the academic program. Data can be organized by student, assignment, academic term, or course. A tool we are developing that can do this is called Skylight Matrix Survey System, which is rebranded as Flashlight Online 2.0 by the TLT Group. The important properties of Skylight for this application are the ability to render a rubric question type and the ability to have many survey instances (respondent pools) within one survey and both report instances individually and aggregate the data across some/all the instances.
Audiences for this data
The transformative aspects of this strategy arise from the multiple audiences for the resulting data. We have labeled these collections of data, and the capacities to present the data to audiences “assessment necklaces”
Figure 2: Diagram of rubric-based assessment. Learners, peers, and faculty are shown collecting data from rubric-based assessment of portfolios, then reflecting on and presenting the multiple data points (necklaces) in contexts important to them.Students can review the data for self-reflection and can use the data as evidence in a learning portfolio. We are exploring ideas like Google’s Motion Chart gadget (aka Trednalyzer/Gapminder) to help visualize this data over time. They can also learn from giving rubric-based reviews to peers and by comparing themselves to aggregates of peer data.
Instructors can use the data (probably presented in the student’s course portfolio) for “grading” in a course. It’s worth noting that the Instructor’s assignments can be assessed with the same rubric, asking, “To what extent does this assignment advance each the goals of this rubric?” With the assignment rated, instructors can review the data across multiple students, assignments, and semesters for their own scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Here the instructor can combine the rubric score of an assignment with the student performance on the assignment to improve the assignment. Instructors might also present this comparison data in a portfolio for more authentic teaching evaluations.
In this example the assignment might be rated by students or the instructor’s peers. Below, the rating of the assignment by wider communities will be explored.
Academic Programs can look across multiple courses and terms, for program-level learning outcomes and SoTL. They can also present the data in showcase portfolios used for recruiting students and faculty, funding and partners. This is where the collective registration of the assignment becomes important. The program can access the assignment in the context of the program, with an eye to coordinate assignments and courses to improve the coherence of the program outcomes.
The community, which might include accrediting bodies, employers and others, can use the data, as presented in portfolios by students, instructors, and the academic program, to reflect on, or give feedback to, the academic program. Over time, an important effect of this feedback should be to open dialogs that lead to changes in the rubric.
Variations on this model
The description above is still traditional in at least two important ways: the program (ie faculty) develop the rubric and the instructor decides the assignment. Variants are possible where outside interested parties participate in these activities.
First variation. WSU and University of Idaho run a joint program in Food Science. We have observed that the program enrolls a significant number of international students, from nations where food security is a pressing issue. We imagine that those nations view training food scientists as a national strategy for economic development.
We have imagined a model where the students (in conjunction with their sponsoring country), and interested NGOs, bring problem statements to the program and the program designs itself so that students are working on aspects of their problem while studying. The sponsors would also have an interest in the rubric, and students would be encouraged (required?) to maintain contacts with sponsors and NGOs and cultivate among them people to provide evaluations using the rubric.
The processes and activities described above would be similar, but the input from stakeholders would be more prominent than in the traditional university course. Review of the assignments, and decisions about the rubric, would be done within this wider community (two universities, national sponsors and NGOs). The review of assignments and the assessment of the relationship of assignments and learning products creates a very rich course evaluation, well beyond the satisfaction models presently used in traditional courses.
Second variation. This option opens the process up further and provides a model to implement Stephen Downes’ idea in Open Source Assessment. Downes says “were students given the opportunity to attempt the assessment, without the requirement that they sit through lectures or otherwise proprietary forms of learning, then they would create their own learning resources.”
In our idea of this model, the learner would come with the problem, or find a problem, and following Downes, learners would present aspects of their work to be evaluated with the program’s rubric, and the institution would credential the work based on its (and the community’s) judging of the problem/solution with the rubric. This sounds a lot like graduate education, the learner defines a problem of significance to a community and addresses that problem to the satisfaction of the community. In our proposed implementation, the ways that the community has access to the process are made more explicit.
In this variant, the decision about the rubric is an even broader community dialog and the assessment of the instructor (now mentor/learning coach) will be done by the community, both in terms of the skills demonstrated by students that the instructor mentored, and by the nature of the problems/approaches/solutions that were a result of the mentoring. The latter asks, is the instructor mentoring the student toward problems that are leading or lagging the thinking of the community?
Examples
For some sense of learning portfolios created by the processes above, consider these winners from CTLT’s 2007-08 ePortfolio contest.
The following two winners are examples of the second variant, where students were paired with a problem from a sponsor:
The Kayafungo Women’s Water Project documents the efforts of Engineers Without Borders at WSU (EWB@WSU) who partnered with the Student Movement for Real Change to provide clean water to 35,000 people in Kayafungo, Kenya.
The EEG Patient Monitoring Device portfolio follows the learning process of four MBA students who collaborated with faculty, the WSU Research Foundation, inventors, and engineers to develop a business plan for a wireless EEG patient monitoring device.
The next two are examples of the second variant -- student defined problems assessed by the community. In the latter case, the student is using the work, both her activism in the community and her study-in-action as her dissertation:
The Grace Foundation started with a vision to create a non-profit organization that would assist poor and disenfranchised communities across Nigeria in four areas: Education, Health, Entrepreneurship and Advocacy. The author used the UN online volunteering program to form a team to develop a participatory model of development that addresses issues of poverty eradication from a holistic manner.
El Calaboz Portfolio chronicles the use of Internet and media strategies by the Lipan Apache Women's Defense, a group that has grown in national and international prominence the last 75 days, from less than 10 people in August, to an e-organization of over 312 individuals currently working collectively. It now includes NGO leaders, tribal leaders, media experts, environmentalists, artists, and lawyers from the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. It recently received official organization status at the UN.
The next steps in this work at WSU are to build worked examples of these software tools and to recruit faculty partners to collaborate in a small scale pilot implementation.
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