Thoughts on Colin Marsh’s 1996 chapter on Assessment and Reporting, in Handbook for Beginning Teachers. (Summary in Prezi)

The concepts of Objective Assessment and Authentic Tasks are now (14 years later) well established and normative. However, learner involvement in planning assessment is still minimal in school classrooms that I have seen.

Ideas to involve learners in planning assessment, online

In Moodle

Create a Glossary activity. As an ‘assessment for learning’ (or formative feedback) it might go like this:

1. Each student is to submit one question (as the card title) and marking criteria (as the card body), tagging it with the curriculum objective (as a keyword).
2. Each student is to answer a number of other students’ questions (as a comment).
3. Each student is to score (using comment ratings) several students’ answers.
4. Teacher is to add a model answer (as a comment) to each question, and guide discussion of the questions with most divergent answers.

In Google Wave

Invite students to a Wave.

1. include links to stimulus material and links to reference tools.
2. pose a question
3. after student answers begin to develop, add a poll to check the understanding of the lurkers. (Voting widgets)

In GoogleDocs

Create a form.

1. In the description include links to stimulus material and links to reference tools.
2. Use a Textbox question to ask students to suggest a question.
3. Use tickboxes to ask students to confirm their perception of their own readiness for testing on each advertised criteria.
4. Hide the summary of results from respondents.
5. Distribute the form to class.
6. Use the results spreadsheet to collate the contributed questions.

References

Marsh, C 1996 Handbook for beginning teachers, Addison Wesley Longman, South Melbourne, pp.213-233.

Other Polling gadgets. http://sites.google.com/site/polloforwave/alternatives