EdPsy 490ASA
Marty Sierra-Perry, project manager
Mini-Project #2
Submitted by Beth Twardowski
 
 

Proposal and Background:

For this project, I propose a re-assessment of the way I teach and assess my social studies units.  The first units include: Early Man, Ancient Mesopotamia, and Ancient Egypt.  This year I am trying a new curriculum format for my units.  This format is an entirely different approach than I have ever used previously.  It focuses on using Gardner’s Seven Intelligences, having students work on many activities in heterogeneous groups, and requiring students to keep a portfolio of all their work in a three ring binder or spiral notebook.  The name of the program is History Alive!  This program does not include any traditional paper/pencil tests such as matching, true/false, or multiple-choice.  The program assesses student learning entirely through group projects, individual projects, and portfolio assessment.  Another unique aspect of this program is the amount of depth that each unit covers.  There is much more knowledge and detail covered than a traditional textbook.  There is no textbook with this series.  The information is based on interactive slide lectures, handouts, skill building activities, and others.  I have the textbook from the series I used last year.  This year students are using it more as a reference.  I will not cover near the material I have previously due to the amount of time required to teach each unit in this program.  My questions are: 1.)  Will students learn more with this type of program? and 2.) Is assessment using the interactive notebook (portfolio) a better assessment than my old traditional paper/pencil tests?
 
 
 

K I know that using a traditional format for testing (multiple-choice, short answer, etc.) works for some students, however, students that have other learning styles or who have difficulty reading may not do as well on these kinds of assessments. I have assigned projects to assess learning in the past.  I know these allow students to show what they know in a more creative and individual manner.  These projects can be a better indicator of what was learned than traditional tests.

W I would like to know if the interactive student notebook assessments and projects are superior to traditional assessments I have used in the past. I would like to know if students learn more of content if more time is spent teaching it.  Using a more in depth approach seems as if it would cause students to learn more, but do they?

L See assessments and project conclusion below.

 

CURRICULUM MAP:
 
 
 

 
 

Analysis:

The main focus of my project was to compare traditional assessment formats with alternative assessments.  The first assessment change was to use portfolios to assess student daily work.  These portfolios are referred to as "interactive notebooks".  I collected and assessed my students interactive notebooks twice during the first quarter.  Students did a self-assessment of their notebooks before turning them in to be graded.    I created a final assessment requiring students to create a newspapers using Microsoft Publisher as opposed to giving the traditional multiple-choice test.  My students are currently studying Ancient Egypt and are working on interactive student notebooks for this topic.

My thoughts regarding the use of interactive student notebooks follow.

• Students are allowed more flexibility to be creative completing assignments.  I view this as very positive and discovered I can assess student knowledge through a wider variety of expression (a poem, diagram, journal entry, etc. as opposed to only comprehension questions).
• The notebooks are valuable to teacher, student, and parent, as they provide a picture of work over time.  It is easy to see growth or lack thereof.  Effort is also easier to assess.
• I am still working hard at keeping notebooks organized, up-to-date, and graded in a timely manner.  It can be very difficult.  I think the benefits outweigh these costs.  Therefore, I plan to continue the interactive notebooks through out the rest of the year.  Hopefully I will get better with this type of assessment as the year progresses.
• I have discovered that students need very specific directions and very specific rubrics given before the assignments.  There is a big correlation between clear directions and rubrics and student results.  I need a great deal of improvement in this area.  Often I find what I really wanted in an assignment was not what I had in the rubric, or that my rubric was too vague.
• I believe students can learn more with this type of approach.  Even though there is more material presented, the students can make the information there won through the interactive notebooks, making it more meaningful and memorable.  There are also many interactive activities in this approach which I believe helps students connect with and remember the subject matter.

My project also involved comparing results of a traditional multiple-choice assessment with an alternative assessment (creating and publishing a newspaper).  The content area objectives were the same for both assessments.

Instead of comparing the results of the newspaper assignment with last year’s data on the multiple-choice test, I gave the multiple-choice test to this year’s class as well.  The data I collected from both assessments is shown below.
 
 
 

	Multiple-choice Test	Newspaper Project
Number of A’s	15	24
Number of B’s	16	10
Number of C’s	4	12
Number of D’s	7	2
Number of F’s	15	3

 

The above data clearly shows a higher score on the newspaper projects compared to the multiple-choice test.  This indicates several possible conclusions.
 

• The newspaper assessment is a better assessment because students received higher grades.
• The grading on the multiple-choice was less subjective, creating inflated grades for the newspaper.
• Regardless of the subjective nature of the grading, the newspaper was a superior assessment due to the more complex thinking, synthesis of information, and creativity involved as opposed to the memorization of isolated facts required on the multiple-choice test.
• Students who do not perform well on traditional tests due to poor reading skills, test anxiety, etc., had higher grades on the newspaper assessment.
• It was very difficult to fail the newspaper assessment as long as some effort was made.  It was much easier to fail the multiple-choice assessment.  Answer less than sixty percent of the questions correctly and the student will fail.

I also analyzed the data on a student-by-student basis.  The table below shows the results of this analysis.
 
 

	Multiple-choice Test	Newspaper Project
Percent of students whose grades were higher on…	9%	61%
Percent of students whose grades were lower on…	61%	9%
Percent of students whose grades remained the same on each assessment…	31%	31%

 

The analysis of this data indicates several conclusions.

• The majority of students performed better or the same on the newspaper project compared to the multiple-choice assessment.
• Only nine percent of students faired worse on the newspaper project.  In most cases, this was due to procrastination and wasting of time on the newspaper, leaving these students with an incomplete project.

The most important questions regarding this analysis are:

• Did I assess the objectives that I wanted to assess?  Were there objectives assessed that I had not planned on assessing?  ?  In response to this question, I feel both assessments met objectives for content; however, there was a greater opportunity for students to show how much they learned when creating the newspaper as opposed to the multiple-choice test.  The test included very specific information.  It would be possible for students to know other information about the topic, but not have the opportunity to demonstrate this knowledge on the multiple-choice test.  I ended up assessing some things I had not originally anticipated.  For example, I assessed items such as creativity and use of graphic.  These are obviously not much related to the social studies content of Ancient Mesopotamia, yet I felt they were important to assess.  I suppose next time I will anticipate this and possibly have separate grades for content and writing.   The newspaper allowed students to show creativity and synthesis of information, where the multiple-choice test did not. I need to do some revising of the rubric before giving this assessment again.  I feel I now have a better idea of what I need to change.  Rubric creation and improvement is one of my goals for this year.

• Which assessment is superior?  Does it depend on my objectives?  Which assessment will I most likely use in the future and why?  In order to determine which assessment is superior, it definitely depends on the objectives that are to be met.  I like the newspaper assessment better in order to assess knowledge learned due to the creative nature, opportunity for synthesis of knowledge, higher order thinking skills, and amount of knowledge that can be shown by students.  They also learn valuable technology skills, such as using Microsoft Publisher.  Students also have an end product to show for their learning and can learn by reading each others newspapers.  Students can also learn from others in the actual newspaper creation process.

• What would I change about these assessments next time?  In response to this question, I would change some of the items on my rubric.  For example, I would require some articles of the newspaper to be about specific topics to ensure important content area is not left out.  I would still allow for some student choice to allow for creativity and synthesis of knowledge.   I would also add some technology objectives such as adding graphics, creating columns, changing font and font size, etc.  Maybe I would collaborate with the English teacher and we could use this project for an English grade where conventions, sentence/paragraph structure would be evaluated.  On the other hand, I cannot assess everything with this one project (I tend to get carried away!).  I’ll have to think more about this project before it is assigned to narrow which objectives are most important to me and change my rubric accordingly.

 

 
 
 

Overall, I was pleased with the results of the newspaper project compared to the traditional test.  .  It was a great deal of fun and the students loved it. Perhaps next year I will give a short quiz over very basic facts I want to make sure students have learned and then assign the newspaper project as well.

Below is the rubric I used to assess the newspaper project.

Rubric for Mesopotamia Newspaper Project:

	A	B	C
Number of Articles	Four or more	Three	Two
Quality of Articles	All articles are very complete.  Information is accurate.  Shows a great deal of understanding of subject matter.	Most articles are complete.  More detail could be added.  Much information is accurate.  Shows fair amount of understanding of subject.	Information is not very accurate. Shows little understanding of subject matter.  Articles are not complete.  Much more detail could be added.
Title and Date	Has appropriate date and title.	Only title or date is included and/or appropriate.	Has neither title nor date, or neither are  appropriate.
Layout	Layout is very similar to a newspaper.	Layout is somewhat similar to a newspaper.	Layout is not similar to a newspaper.
Creativity	Highly creative writing.	Somewhat creative in writing.	Little creativity of writing.
Graphic	Excellent use of graphic.	Good use of graphic.	Poor use of graphic or no graphic included.