Subject: RE: Assessment in math courses
From: Cohen, Deborah (dcohen@jt.cc.va.us)
Date: Tue Feb 29 2000 - 15:21:09 EST
For the somewhat uninformed, some definitions:
The giving of individual student grades is called "evaluation". Examining
how students are performing as a group for the purpose of making informed,
hopefully intelligent, decisions about course content, curricula, teaching
methods, etc., is called assessment. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to
base decisions about course content (or changing topic emphasis, at least),
curriculum organization, teaching methods, use of technology or lack
thereof, etc., on the basis of a single individual student's grade, would
it? The grade the student is assigned is a measure of how well that student
performed against the instructor's expectations (explicit or implicit) of
what students should know about particular course topics. After the
instructor assigns grades to a class on a particular test or other
instrument, and looks at those grades, maybe even calculates mean and median
scores, then the instructor can essentially say, "My students have a pretty
decent understanding of ____ topics" or "My students really don't understand
much at all about _____.", but that's about all that an examination of the
group's grades themselves will tell him/her. However, if the instructor,
after assigning grades to a class, maybe does a little item analysis to
determine particular areas of strength and weakness in the class as a whole,
and makes decisions about how to teach the topic(s) differently next time,
that exercise would be considered assessment, since the instructor now has
more specific, reliable information about what the students (as a whole)
learned or didn't learn. Even better, if the instructor used portfolios of
students' work throughout the semester, asking the students to reflect on
their progress, strengths, and weaknesses by the end of the semester, and if
the instructor reviewed a sample of those portfolios to look for common
patterns of strengths and weaknesses in the students as a whole, maybe to
help decide whether to include more or less writing assignments, group or
individual projects, etc., the next time he/she taught the course, that
would be a more informative way of making instructional decisions. Again,
the emphasis in assessment is on looking at the students as a group, as
opposed to evaluation, where the students are viewed only as individuals and
are measured individually in terms of meeting a particular standard.
A concrete example: suppose I grade Johnny's test #2 and give him a grade
of 63. I can look at Johnny's test paper and have some idea of what Johnny
understood and didn't understand well when he took the exam. This
information will help me to hopefully make specific suggestions to Johnny on
how to improve his performance, but it doesn't really tell me much about how
effective the activities that I gave the class in this section of the course
were. However, if I take a look at all of the students' tests, analyze them
for particular strengths and weaknesses by an item analysis (formal or
informal), that may suggest particular areas of strength or weakness (they
can manipulate the quadratic equation pretty well as a group, but there's a
definite weakness in their application of it in word problems, for example)
for which I may want to try to design an instructional solution (i.e., maybe
next time, I will trying spending more time on word problems, or will try to
find word problem examples that are more interesting to the students). That
reflective activity of examining what is happening to my students as a
group, and using that information to help me make informed instructional
decisions, that is assessment. I could also use comparisons of student
grades from semester to semester in the same course, particularly if I'm
interested in taking a look over time at how a particular change in
instructional activity is affecting the students, but statistically there
are obvious problems with this approach - the grades that are being compared
may be coming from testing instruments that are not exactly the same; I may
not have students of similar ability levels in each semester, so that
increases or decreases in student grade performance may not primarily be a
factor of changes I've made in instructional strategies, etc. This is one
of the reasons that grades are not commonly considered as assessments,
because they are often problematic in pointing instructors in the direction
of where changes are needed and helping them to devise such changes in
effective ways.
Hope this helps! DC
-----Original Message-----
From: Bret Taylor [mailto:bret@iag.net]
Sent: None
To: Lindsey, Dr. Charles; mathedcc@archives.math.utk.edu
Subject: RE: Assessment in math courses
At 01:39 PM 2/29/00 -0500, Lindsey, Dr. Charles wrote:
>I'm puzzled--how does one assign grades without doing assessments?
Ask any administrator. They have lot's of ideas. :-)
>
>Chuck Lindsey, Ph.D. clindsey@fgcu.edu
>Director of General Education
>Associate Professor and Program Leader, Mathematics
>Florida Gulf Coast University
>10501 FGCU Blvd South
>Fort Myers, FL 33965-6565
>Phone: (941) 590-7168 FAX: (941) 590-7200
>http://itech.fgcu.edu/faculty/clindsey
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Cohen, Deborah [SMTP:dcohen@jt.cc.va.us]
>> Sent: Tuesday, February 29, 2000 12:39 PM
>> To: mathedcc@archives.math.utk.edu
>> Subject: Assessment in math courses
>>
>> Are any of you currently involved in assessment activities in your
classes
>> or departments? If so, what sorts of assessment techniques are you
using,
>> and what sorts of results have you found? If you're not interested in
>> assessment in your classes, why not? Any opinions out there about why
>> math
>> faculty are (or at least SEEM) so resistant to doing assessment?
>> Thanks, DC
>> (a 10-year veteran math faculty member who just became an administrator!)
>>
>> Deborah L. Cohen
>> Coordinator of Assessment, Research, and Planning
>> John Tyler Community College
>> 13101 Jefferson Davis Highway
>> Chester, VA 23831
>> email: dcohen@jt.cc.va.us
>> Phone: 804.796.4174
>> FAX: 804.796.4163
>> Web: www.jt.cc.va.us
>>
>>
>>
>>
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