sweet & simple formative e-assessment

(re-posted from http://feasst.wlecentre.ac.uk/)

Powerpoint is usually condemned as the archetypal counter-example to formative e-assessment. PowerPoint doesn’t have any mechanism for collecting feedback from the audience, once you your presentation is rolling there’s little you can do to change its course.

PollEverywhere changes that. Their plugin allows you to conduct polls, collect responses by twitter or other tools, and display them as text or charts. Now all you need is a few action buttons, and you have a contingency point in powerpoint: a junction where you change your presentation path based on audience feedback.

As always, the specific technology is an illustration. You may know of other tools that do the same (and please add them in the comments). What you should take from this is the design pattern.

(HT Jane via @tryberg)

While we’re on the subject, the outputs from the formative e-assessment project’s dissemination event are available at:

http://feasst.wlecentre.ac.uk/april-28th/

And version 2 of the report at:

http://telearn.noe-kaleidoscope.org/open-archive/browse?resource=1875

Formative e-Assessment: theory, practice, patterns

The Centre for Work-based Learning and the London Knowledge Lab are presenting findings from the JISC-funded project ‘Scoping a Vision of Formative E-Assessment’ on Tuesday, April 28. The event will present our theoretical findings, case stories and design patterns, and will include keynotes by Dylan Wiliam and Diana Laurilard. The event is held at the London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, University of London, from 10.10 – 4.00. The day is free to attend but you need to register to let us know you are going to be there. Please go to http://www.eventelephant.com/feasst to register. Please note that this event it being held at the London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald Street, London WC1N 3QS, which is a short distance from the main Institute of Education building. A programme for the day and map url are included on the registration site. If you have any queries about the day, please contact Sarah Gelcich at s.gelcich@ioe.ac.uk

attribution bugs in the formative e-assessment report

The report I posted a few days ag0 had some serious faults in terms of links, credits and references. If you’ve downloaded it, please discard and get a fresh copy. Sorry for the inconvinience.

two new publications: cases to patterns, formative e-assessment

Scoping a vision for formative e-assessment: a project report for JISC

Norbert Pachler and Harvey Mellar and Caroline Daly and Yishay Mor and Dylan Wiliam and Diana Laurillard Institute of Education, WLE, (2009)

Assessment is an integral part of teaching and learning. If the relationship between teaching and learning were causal, i. e. if students always mastered the intended learning outcomes of a particular sequence of instruction, assessment would be superfluous. Experience and research suggest this is not the case: what is learnt can often be quite different from what is taught. Formative assessment is motivated by a concern with the elicitation of relevant information about student understanding and / or achievement, its interpretation and an exploration of how it can lead to actions that result in better learning. In the context of a policy drive towards technology-enhanced approaches to teaching and learning, the question of the role of digital technologies is key and it is the latter on which this project particularly focuses. The project and its deliverables have been informed by recent and relevant literature, in particular recent work by Black and In this work, they put forward a framework which suggests that assessment for learning their term for formative assessment can be conceptualised as consisting of a number of aspects and five key strategies. The key aspects revolve around the where the learner is going, where the learner is right now and how she can get there and examines the role played by the teacher, peers and the learner.

Dealing with abstraction: Case study generalisation as a method for eliciting design patterns

Niall Winters and Yishay Mor Computers in Human Behavior(2009) Available online 14 February 2009 .

Developing a pattern language is a non-trivial problem. A critical requirement is a method to support pattern writers with abstraction, so as they can produce generalised patterns. In this paper, we address this issue by developing a structured process of generalisation. It is important that this process is initiated through engaging participants in identifying initial patterns, i.e. directly dealing with the ‘cold-start’ problem. We have found that short case study descriptions provide a productive ‘way into’ the process for participants. We reflect on a 1-year interdisciplinary pan-European research project involving the development of almost 30 cases and over 150 patterns. We provide example cases, detailing the process by which their associated patterns emerged. This was based on a foundation for generalisation from cases with common attributes. We discuss the merits of this approach and its implications for pattern development.

Avi Berman: Attempts of a Mathematician to do Research in Maths Education. Thurs. 5 Feb. 2009, LKL

I’m hosting Professor Avi Berman for a talk at the LKL next week:

Avi Berman: Attempts of a Mathematician to do Research in Maths Education

Thursday 5 February 2009, 12:30pm - 2:00pm
LKL large seminar hall

The effects of teaching linear algebra involving technology-enabled feedback on pedagogical development of lecturers and on conceptual understanding of their students.

Because of logistic constraints and a long-term tradition, large-group frontal lecturing is the main form of teaching undergraduate mathematics. Unfortunately, the traditional lecture, as inspirational as it might be, does not allow many opportunities for developing students’ conceptual understanding through active learning, and supplies lecturers with limited feedback on how effective their teaching is. What the students actually learn when attending lectures remains chiefly a black box for contemporary research and little is known about the pedagogical development of university professors through lecturing. The talk will describe an effort to address this lacuna in the context of a university linear algebra course.

BIO

Avi Berman holds the Israel Pollak Academic Chair at the Technion, where he is a Professor of Mathematics and Head of the Department of Education of Technology and Science. He also heads the Israeli Society for Promotion of and Research on Giftedness. His research interests in Mathematics are Nonnegative Matrices and Spectral Graph Theory and in Education – Mathematical Giftedness and University Teaching.

Entry is free, but we would appreciate your registration for administrative purposes:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=paWD5G3TpfquS9mapXP1oZA