3.5. Post-Assessment Finale

"I am not young enough to know everything."--Oscar Wilde

One method of post-assessment that worked fairly successfully for the Data Analysis & Statistics unit (February and March) in this class was to have the students work in groups to create their own test questions according to guidelines on relevance, whether the question let them demonstrate their knowledge and was fair, and clarity. I had a say in what questions finally appeared, which were included verbatim, and created some of my own for topics where student questions seemed somewhat inadequate. Students were encouraged to draw upon numerous examples of homework or classwork problems that they had already seen, and it gave them experience in attempting to write understandable and worthwhile assessments for themselves as well as functioning as a subtle kind of review, as they also had to turn in solutions for their questions.

Thus, this assessment was three-pronged: First, as they discussed questions, I circulated around the classroom taking notes on student contributions and looked over the test questions to see what kinds of understanding (and priorities) emerged. Second, they actually took the test, with questions included verbatim from studen contributions, and I sat down to take it with them. (The last question on that test was to choose and critique one of the questions, again with guidelines.) Third, in order to receive their graded tests back, students in groups had to grade two of my responses to the test questions (which I photocopied in sufficient quantity), bearing in mind whether the responses were correct and how much they wanted to weight each part of the answer. My responses were deliberately chosen so they were not exemplars, which would have defeated the purpose (among other things, the second response was glaringly incomplete); the groups' discussions as well as their written notes on the grading process were illuminating, and showed some interesting thoughts on how to decide what a "right" or "good" answer constituted for those questions.

I think such a three-pronged approach could be used for this unit as well, or indeed, any unit after a given class has relaxed enough to feel comfortable with such an assignment. In addition, I will include questions from the PREVIEW (GIF scan) so students can see the progress they've made over the course of the unit. This will also ensure some level of "coverage" of computational skills. A modification I would like to make, at the suggestion of Frederict Wan, is to warn the class that the most "challenging" and appropriate questions will be chosen for the test. Thus, students will have some incentive to ensure that their questions appear so they know what's coming.

One disadvantage of this approach is that I won't know what will appear on the test exactly until I see what they turn in, but the previous experiment leaves me confident that questions of interest will emerge, some of which I wouldn't have thought of on my own.

Copyright © 2002 Yoon Ha Lee <requiescat@cityofveils.com>
Last updated on 20 May 2002