Assessment


 * Write your summarizing comments about "Assessment" here: **

LF:

This section of the article focuses on how technology can better facilitate student assessment and, ultimatley, student learning. The opening of the article states that we struggle with collecting and aggregrating student learning data in ways that are meaningful and accessible to educators and students. I think that the C&I team is improving their methods of doing so with the implementation of recent initiatives including the regular reporting project, mapping objectives to assessment items project, and the assessments in every lesson initiative. I think we still need additional training on how to analyze the data and to develop a standard means of communicating our findings.

The segment on the River City effort (virtual environment designed by researched to study how students learn) really piqued my interest. It made me wonder if CA could implement a similar study using Dimension M. Also, I will be sure to consider some of the capabilities of the technology (ability to have students create/design products/experiments, manipulate parameters, run tests, record data) when identifying online tools that we would like to create during the next build cycle.

The article also addresses ways that technology can promote student-to-student interaction, an objective that is a challenge for us due to the nature of our program. The section highlighted a product called Group Scribbles, a system that allows students to contribute to group discussions by sketching and making notes on an electronic whiteboard. This seems like a valuable tool for students and I think something of this nature would work well in our environment - Perhaps, we could enhance the functionality of our Discussion assessments to make them more synchronous and to allow students to do more than just type text and/or upload documents.