{"id":129,"date":"2013-06-28T10:36:06","date_gmt":"2013-06-28T09:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jugu.org\/gblog\/?p=129"},"modified":"2013-06-28T11:46:04","modified_gmt":"2013-06-28T10:46:04","slug":"assessment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jugu.org\/gblog\/2013\/06\/28\/assessment\/","title":{"rendered":"Assessment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Assessment is an interesting subject. \u00a0In everyday life assessment is usually against a standard of &#8216;fit for purpose&#8221;. But what is the purpose of education?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"line-height: 14px;\"><strong>&#8216;It&#8217;s a good thing&#8217;<\/strong>. \u00a0So everyone does it, learning things they may not necessarily need to know, as an entry into civilised society and as a qualification for employment. \u00a0The higher the score the better you are deemed to be; hence highly structured, consistent assessment which does not try to assess useful knowledge, just knowledge to a standard.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><strong>To be better at what you have chosen to do<\/strong>. \u00a0Hence vocational education including things like law and accountancy. \u00a0Even here it is really only an entry card with real life needing internet trawling for precedent and case law. \u00a0Assessment in this case should be authentic to practical demands and involve problem solving. \u00a0Some of it is like this, some of it is just mindless repetition of facts.<\/li>\n<li><strong>To be able to do something new.<\/strong> \u00a0This is the tricky one but particularly relevant to OU and distance education. \u00a0In this case, reliance on context and &#8216;real life&#8217; situations actively discriminates against those with no current context. \u00a0Case studies are OK where the context is provided but questions relying on use of knowledge from practice and contextual background are not.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So it is horses for courses. \u00a0However, it is difficult to see how formative assessment\/feedback on coursework cannot be beneficial in all three situations, in that it is by nature personal, relevant and remedial. \u00a0However, coursework used in summative assessment can be &#8216;gamed&#8217; and hence has got a bad name &#8211; it is said to be too easy. \u00a0It does though represent a much closer approximation to how knowledge is gained and refined in everyday life than terminal summative assessment.<\/p>\n<p>So I think Web 2.0 tools should be very valuable for assessment. \u00a0Assessment of forums, blogs, quizzes, wikis, shared projects should all contribute to measurement of performance. \u00a0How one does that consistently and equitably is another discussion but it seems to be a demonstrably more appropriate system than trying to make terminal summative assessment authentic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Assessment is an interesting subject. \u00a0In everyday life assessment is usually against a standard of &#8216;fit for purpose&#8221;. But what is the purpose of education? &#8216;It&#8217;s a good thing&#8217;. \u00a0So everyone does it, learning things they may not necessarily need to know, as an entry into civilised society and as a qualification for employment. \u00a0The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[39],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-h817","tag-h817"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jugu.org\/gblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jugu.org\/gblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jugu.org\/gblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jugu.org\/gblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jugu.org\/gblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jugu.org\/gblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131,"href":"https:\/\/jugu.org\/gblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions\/131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jugu.org\/gblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jugu.org\/gblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jugu.org\/gblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}