Assessment and Evaluation

This week’s photo credit goes to my daughter Angela for this gorgeous windblown shot from the shores of Lake Champlain. Although we jokingly refer to that area as Vermont’s Banana Belt, when the wind comes whipping from the North that is so not the case. This past week we had a record-breaking storm and my little neck of the woods which is a bowl east of Bolton Mountain and south of Mount Mansfield (Stowe) received 30 inches in 24 hours! I am blessed that I only had to shovel it and not drive in it.

This was the week to ponder assessment and evaluation. Assessment is an ongoing process that as Elaine says is taking a pulse…appraisal. I resonated with these definitions in Assessing Open and Distanced Learners:

Assessment is a human activity, involving interactions aimed at seeking to understand what learners have achieved. Like any social interactions…there is nothing definitive or exact about the outcome. Assessment may occur in formal or informal ways, and it may be descriptive rather than judgmental in nature.

The primary purpose of assessment is to increase students’ learning and development, rather than simply to grade or rank students performance. Naturally one cannot grade student performance without first assessing it, but it is implied that grading is a secondary activity to the primary goal of helping learners to diagnose problems and improve the quality of their subsequent learning.

From Pathways to Good Practice at Southern Cross University I appreciated the list of reasons why you want evaluation of your courses. You need to see:

• how well your teaching is received by students and why
• whether the students find your learning materials are helpful to their learning
• whether aspects of the unit delivery are satisfactory to students and help them to learn

While the storm was dumping the white stuff, I took myself on a bit of a TANGENT. This word with Latin and Greek roots is mathematical in nature. The first part tan, coming from Latin and meaning touch or reach; and the second half came from Greek and having to do with a corner or a bend. It was not until the early 1800’s that the word was used for the meaning I have implied – a divergence or path slightly connected with the subject. From the Greek and Latin roots dictionary puns section: Old mathematicians never die, they just go off on a tangent. The trail I went down was a study of the SOLO (the Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes) taxonomy coined by J B Biggs and K F Collis in 1982. It is a further development of Bloom’s taxonomy which Bigg’s described as a framework for understanding understanding, which for me makes the job of assessing student responses ever so much easier: As students learn, the outcomes of their learning display similar stages of increasing structural complexity. There are two main changes: quantitative, as the amount of detail in the student’s response increases; and qualitative, as that detail becomes integrated into a structural pattern. The quantitative changes occur first, then learning changes qualitatively.

I think that the reason I find this so helpful is that I currently teach mostly art and history and I find it difficult to assess learning when the answers students give are somehow so subjective. I am not looking for content-based outcomes. I am looking for how the students integrate the content and make connections with it. In The Experience of Learning, while writing about the "Quantitative Conception of Knowledge," Dahlgren calls SOLO an attempt at empirical classification of levels of outcome in a form which has wide applicability (31).

In the Quantitative realm there are three levels: prestructural, unistructural, and multistructural. On the prestructural level answers seem to miss the point, or contain bits and pieces of information. The unstructural level may answer part of the question, but be an oversimplification. On the multistructural level the answer may make several connections, but not see the whole. In the Qualitative realm the two levels are relational and extended abstract. In the relational realm the answers show the knowledge of the parts and the whole. And in the extended abstract the student begins to make connections outside the area under discussion.