Timely Snow

Today we had our second class, which included a syllabus review (postponed from first class so students could read it first), a discussion of the aims of education and how assessment figures into determining what is taught as well as what as been learned. We use a revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives to talk about how one can measure what students know/have learned. It’s a useful framework, and this semester we’re going to have students use that framework to write exam questions based on the material covered in the first half of the course. So they should learn it fairly well, and I think it will be something that they use in their careers.

When I first taught this course last year, I was surprised to see that there was no exam. In the past there had been one, but it had someone gone away in the belief that an examination was not “authentic” compared to having the students write about how they’d apply to teaching what they’re learning about. I think that’s a fair point. On the other hand, assessment is so central to teaching and learning that it’s important for students to take it on as deeply as possible while they’re training to become teachers. That can include confronting the anxiety that their students will face, and it certainly should involve looking at both sides of writing and taking exam questions. At least I hope so.

The tactic we came up with was to develop what we’re calling an “open source exam,” Students will write a total of  4 exam questions, two short-answer and two multiple-choice or similar format and will write questions that vary across the components of Bloom’s taxonomy. They will also critique each others’ exam questions. Then we will produce an exam comprised of items selected from the pool of questions generated across all the sections (there should be ~600 items in the pool), all of which will be available to them.

This is a bit of a high-risk activity, because we’re trusting that students will be able to generate a pool of high-quality questions. I think the gamble is worthwhile, because the payoff will be a) better knowledge of the educational psychology material, b) sophistication in writing test items and answers, and experience in thinking through the range of ways one can assess learning.

I’ll post a discussion of how it all goes.

In some ways, the high point of today’s class ended up being the discussion of the syllabus. The students have had a semester’s worth of classes together and so know each other well. There were good comments and questions about the value of this course and why it’s set up the way it is. Should be an interesting semester.

I didn’t think I did a particularly good job of going through the broader aims of education part of the class, perhaps because it’s too abstract a concept to explore in just a few minutes. We also worked through a transcript of a U.S. math class (that we’ll watch again in a different context) to look at the kind of assessment that occurs in the course of ordinary classroom discourse. I think that would work better with a contrasting case to compare it to. Instead, we pushed on to try to generate some questions from a reading passage used on the MEAP. I thought that was important as a bridge toward the question-writing they’ll be doing this semester. Next time I think I’d just focus on classroom discourse and have them compare the math video with an example from a class with a different questioning style.

Finally, I announced the existence and location of this weblog in class, so I’m hoping to see some comments from my students. It’s always hard to generate the kind of specific information you need to improve a class; this might be a way to gather that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Educational Psychology, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.