During this week, our ICTs in ELT professor explained to us the topic of evaluating our students' online work. To start, it is important to know that there is a difference between assessment and evaluation. Our facilitator Evelyn Izquierdo provided us with the following definitions:
Assessment requires the gathering of evidence of student performance over a period of time to measure learning and understanding. Evidence of learning could take the form of dialogue, journals, written work, portfolios, tests along with many other learning tasks.
Evaluation on the other hand occurs when a mark is assigned after the completion of a task, test, quiz, lesson or learning activity. A mark on a spelling test will determine if the child can spell the given words and would be seen as an evaluation.
There are different tools to assess students' work such as: - Concept Maps
- Concept Tests
- Knowledge Survey
- Exams
- Oral Presentations
- Poster Presentations
- Peer Review
- Portfolios
- Rubrics
- Written Reports
Other assessment types includes: concept sketches, case studies, seminar-style courses, mathematical thinking and performance assessments.
E-assessment is becoming widely used. It has many advantages over traditional (paper-based) assessment. The advantages include:
lower long-term costs
- instant feedback to students
- greater flexibility with respect to location and timing
- improved reliability (machine marking is much more reliable than human marking)
- greater storage efficiency - tens of thousands of answer scripts can be stored on a server compared to the physical space required for paper scripts
- enhanced question styles which incorporate interactivity and multimedia.
There are also disadvantages. E-assessment systems are expensive to establish and not suitable for every type of assessment (such as extended response questions). The main expense is not technical; it is the cost of producing high quality assessment items - although this cost is identical when using paper-based assessment.
These are some websites where you can create rubrics and other assessment tools for your lessons:
Rubistar
WebQuest
Cmaptools
I created my own rubric as an example to assess my students online work of their Class Blog (final project). Visit the link here
References and links to expand on this topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-assessment
http://www.slideshare.net/EvelynIzquierdo/e-assessment
