Ed Psy 490 ASA
Mini-Project #2
S. Holderread
island architects, inc.
and
Analysis of Results
Project Summary:
In Phase I of this project, I outlined some of the concerns I had about assessment: namely, how to thoughtfully, effectively, and efficiently assess the approximately 100 students in my Honors/AP World Geography course. Despite my gut feeling that the "best" way for students to show me what they have learned is through a project or essay, I continually relied, in part, on fixed-response/multiple choice questions because of the ease with which they are graded. Since the fixed-response test can be graded electronically, it is helpful in providing the prompt feedback that students want and need. Still, I had some qualms--I suppose you could also call it guilt--about relying on multiple choice tests, since (among other things) "the ability to organize and present ideas...cannot be measured" with these instruments (Linn, 195). I chose to revise two assessments related to my Physical Processes Unit. The seeds of my new Performance Assessments had been planted.
Prior to the revisions, my students took, for example, multiple choice quizzes on landforms and the processes that create them. These quizzes were good at showing me how well students could memorize and report back facts, and students generally did extremely well. Give these students anything to memorize and they're in heaven. Why? Because it does not require them to think much, and you can be guaranteed that most of them will memorize facts for the test, then promptly forget the information.
As with the Unrevised Landform Processes Quiz, my Unrevised Climate Assessment had some of the same characteristics. It, too, would require students to answer some fixed-response questions based on what they knew about the factors that affect climate. One worthwhile part of this assessment was the section where I gave students the latitude and longitude coordinates of a mystery location, and instructed them to write a paragraph, using their Goode's World Atlas as their guide, explaining why the climate was the way it was in that mystery spot. This challenged them to apply what they had learned about weather and climate to a completely new situation, and required them to organize and clearly communicate their findings in writing. I decided to keep this notion in the back of my mind as I revised the assessments, since I liked the kind of thinking and skills it demanded of the students.