Week 2; Post 1: Assessment of an academic one-shot class

Continuing on my first post where I discussed the situational factors, goals, and outcomes are for my assignment-driven one-shot courses, this post will discuss the assessment portion of the instructional design.

Procedures for Educative Assessment

 

1. Forward-Looking Assessment

        Depending on the assignment the class is working on, the forward-looking assessment could vary. I'm going to go ahead and recall a class I taught in Spring 2015 for this. 

   The class was a freshman English course, and the instructor was having them work on an assignment where they were researching the job market for their individual majors. I could have done a basic introductory overview of our resources, but in alignment with the instructions vision for the assignment, I asked them to think more deeply about the paper. I asked them to imagine they are graduating from college and they are looking to begin their career based off their major. There are a number of websites to visit while applying for jobs. Are there any professional organizations they can belong to that will provide them with additional connections and job opportunities? When they begin getting interviews, how will they learn about the company/organization? (Looking back on that class now, this instructor was a pro at instructional design!) Since this scenario was likely to be something that the students would actually experience in a couple years, this is a great example of forward-looking assessment.

2. Criteria & Standards

      While there are a number of criteria for evaluating the successful mastery of the above scenario, let's just pick out one for this worksheet. High quality work would be demonstrated by a student's ability to gather current information about a company/organization from a credible resource. Let's imagine this in a written assignment to make this a bit easier. They can copy/paste info to be more time efficient in a quick one-shot.
                Standards: 1- how recent is the information? The more recent, the higher the grade. 2- Are the resources credible? They should include links to the information they found. There are a number of places students could retrieve this information such as business & statistic databases and company/organization websites to name a couple. 3- How thorough is their information? Students should have at least a couple paragraphs of information . This information should include some of the following: company history, mission/purpose goals or values, size of company, net worth if applicable, potential salary for the student, location, and more.

3. Self Assessment

       Just thinking for a moment, I think a great way to self-assess this kind of project would begin with groupwork. By dividing the class into groups of 2 or 3, students can read each others assignment and then ask questions about missing information. From this kind of activity the students will learn what types of questions they should be asking themselves while gathering company information. This will also help them later when they do their interview for the job because they'll be better prepared!

4. "FIDeLity" Feedback

          Since this is a one-shot class  I'm pretty much giving feedback the entire time The students have their own computer workstations to follow along with me, so perhaps walking around the room more often could give me visible evidence that they're on the same page as me (no pun intended). I do like to ask them questions throughout the class and have a discussion after showing them a short video by Yavapai College on Databases (found here) to digest what they learned. When they answer my questions correctly I tell them so. When they're close I'll tell them they're close and to think about it more (I allow others to chime in). When they're wrong I am gentle about telling them so, and then we revisit the topic together.




Phew! This is actually pretty difficult for one-shot classes! I hope I'm on the right track!