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.