Assessments

Assessments can cause anxiety among some students.  Clear instructions about assessments may be able to alleviate some of that anxiety. Assessments can be classified as the following:

• Formative assessments
• Summative Assessments
• Students’ reflection of their own learning (included in formative or summative assessments)

Reflection is often omitted when considering active learning, but it doesn’t have to be that way! A few reflective activity techniques that have been successfully applied are:

• Create a screencast that demonstrates a complex answer and explains it thoroughly. Add elements where some learners answer correctly, and the others get it wrong. Engage students in a discussion to reflect upon the challenges they may have faced and improve in this situation. This enables the students to assess their own learning, and how far they have achieved towards a specific challenge;
• Allow the students to go back to their quiz/ test answers and reflect on their learning. Ask them to reflect on their performance by posing questions and encouraging reflection;
• Ask the students to reflect on their discussion posts. Encourage them to reflect upon how frequently they posted, what they posted and what they may have learnt from their posts. Using voice threads for commenting on discussion posts can add value;
• To assess students’ mastery of the content, ask them to create a project/ content that connects theory to practice;
• Ask the students to reflect upon the work done by presenting a ‘reflection assignment’ in the form of a project video, an audio file/podcast, or an infographic;
• Rubrics can bring in clarity of criteria and trigger reflective habits. Rubrics may help students improve their performance (Barkley, 2016).