6 Assessment that supports mid level domain knowledge
“When tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the fire department usually uses water.”
– Unknown
Benefit of assessing APPLY
Does your course (or the course that will follow your course) require learners to take skills/concepts introduced and use them in a new situation?
Some of the ways the EVALUATE level can be accomplished could ask a learner to;
- use newtons second law to solve one of two problems given,
- conduct a multivariate statistical analysis on a new/novel data set,
- reverse engineer a robots actions given, in to an ordered set of programming commands, or
- create a decision tree to help your team use time efficiently.
Benefit of assessing ANALYZE
Does your course (or the course that will follow your course) require learners to analyze the relationship between constituent parts, structures and/or purpose?
Some of the ways the EVALUATE level can be accomplished could ask a learner to;
- show the relationship between different flora and fauna in an ecological setting,
- express the relationships between different part of government and their impact on local/national communities, or
- analyze the relationship between two different studies through their report of findings.
Assessment OF Analyze #1
Create a short scenario based assessment which requires a learner, or team of learners, to solve with process, result, and expected impact statement submitted.
An example scenario video:
Assessment AS Apply #1
Embed an opportunity for your learners to practice;
- taking a problem/situation and apply a material / process in ways that gain speed, consistency,
- choosing a type of problem-solving strategy for different situations given,
- recognizing the correct use of procedures, principles, rules, and steps with routine problems, or
- using a procedure, principle, rule correctly with routine problems, then complex ones.
Assessment AS Analyze #1
Embed an opportunity for your learners to practice;
- using types of thinking strategies to analyze and evaluate their own thinking,
- choosing the best type of thinking strategy to use in different real-world situations,
- explaining instances of open- and closed-mindedness,
- explaining instances of responsible versus irresponsible and accurate versus inaccurate applications of thinking strategies, or
- answering questions that require persistence in discovering and analyzing data or information.
Assessment FOR Analyze #1
Do you present learners with ‘challenge questions’ at any point in your course or even weekly throughout your course? Yes?! excellent! These are great example of assessing FOR analysis… if you are reviewing the responses in order to adjust your upcoming lecture presentations, and mid-term Q&A sessions!
One process where ‘challenge questions’ can be embedded throughout your course, to help you gauge learning and the need for further explanations/resourcing/examples is;
- In the last five minutes of each scheduled lecture you post a real world problem that can be solved by applying the days concepts.
- The question posted is also posted within the online course space as a 1 questions quiz, and unlocks for a limited time to respond (eg. learners have 48 hours after the lecture ends to submit their answer showing their work).
- Each following Lecture starts by sharing the previous weeks challenge stats (maybe mentioning the top 3 to-date point earners;-).
- If a large number of incorrect responses occur the first few minutes corrects for this misunderstanding before moving to new concepts/details.
- At the end of the course the course points leader is announced.