I remember growing up and listening to my grandmother proclaim to my father, "Eugene, that is a bad habit, we need to nip it in the bud, before it gets really bad." The saying, "Nip it in the Bud", comes from plant origins, whereby gardeners would pull off buds of plants to prevent them from growing any bigger. According to www.thefreedictionary.com, if you nip something in the bud, you stop a problem from becoming serious by dealing with it as soon as you notice it.
In education, this could translate into using formative assessment to diagnose student problems before they write a unit test, midterm or final exam. One of the promising practices in using formative e-assessment, is that it will give you rich assessment data in a timely manner before errors fossilize. Many top performing schools use common formative assessment on a frequent basis. Then, they analyze these results, make adjustments to their teaching, and re-teach individual students before the student takes any kind of summative assessment.
At my current school, we embarked on a study to see if using formative e-assessment would help raise student achievement in grade 9 science. Two grade 9 science teachers developed over 1000 multiple choice type questions and used Moodle to deliver these question to grade 9 science students in the form of practice tests (self assessments). Students were encouraged to take the self assessments as many times as they liked. Each time the student submitted the self assessment, the computer would score their attempt. Rich feedback would be available to students at the bottom of each question to act as extra information to further enhance learning, as indicated by the red font in the picture below.
Has using formative e-assessment raised achievement in grade 9 science? Action research in the field of education is always challenging because there are so many factors that could attribute to a rise in student achievement beyond the strategy you employed. That said, our end of year exam results over the last three years have shown promising signs that may lead to a conclusion that formative e-assessment is helping our grade 9 science students achieve mastery. The graph below shows what percentage of students achieved a score of 85% or higher(standard of excellence) on the end of year exam. There is a remarkable trend in the last 3 years of the graph, which were the years we employed formative e-assessment.
Electronic assessment has gained considerable criticism over the years. Some claim that multiple choice questions are a poor way to assess learning. I would agree with this claim, if it was the only way we assess students. It is important to note that our school did not abandon other forms of assessment. We continue to use portfolios, projects and a variety of assessment practices to ensure students are given an opportunity to demonstrate their learning in a plethora of modalities. Our
formative e-assessment project is giving students and teachers the opportunity
to understand what students know, what they do not know, and is affording them
the opportunity to take actions to fill in the gap in a timely manner. We are finding that formative e-assessment is promoting student responsibility and building student self efficacy. This low-risk approach to formative assessment
in Moodle is enabling students to build self confidence. Students do not engage in activities they
believe will lead to negative outcomes. With
the help of formative e-assessments, students are engaged in their learning and
more motivated to seek help and review material, because they are encouraged to make
multiple attempts at constructing knowledge.
If your school is implementing a similar strategy, or considering employing this type of assessment, I would love to hear from you!
