Evaluation of Process
Evaluation of a student’s process is often considered lower-stakes assessment. Lower-stakes classroom assessments should be conducted frequently and show what students have learned or are having troulbe with in our courses. Lower-stakes assessments often build up and allow students to succeed at high-stakes assessment of student learning, which are indeed valuable pedagogical techniques for summative evaluation.
Why use lower-stakes assessments?
Have you ever given students an exam or had them write a final paper only to discover—frustrated and perhaps too late to do anything about it—that they had not learned nearly as much as you had hoped?
- Well-designed formative assessment of student learning can help us shape our teaching in ways that allows for genuine and meaningful student learning.
- Making formative assessment lower-stakes in terms of the impact it has on a students’ final course grade places the focus on their ongoing learning and your willingness to use your expertise in adapting your teaching to help students learn key course concepts.
- One of the most significant aspects of good formative assessment is that it not only gives students feedback from you about their learning, but it can give students tools to assess their own learning (Angelo and Cross, 1993).
Lower-stakes classroom assessment examples
Metaphor Games and Extended Analogies
As Bean (1996) says, “Metaphoric or analogic thinking looks at X from the perspective of Y.” In addition to constructing metaphors for certain learning processes, instructors can ask students to share their metaphors and compare insights that arise from the different metaphors.
“Writing an essay is like___________.”
“Quantum physics is like __________but Relativity is like___________.”
Writing Dialogues
To help students integrate a range of perspectives in course content, instructors can have them write imaginary dialogues between people with opposing views, or characters from a work of fiction. This can also work as a group project or in an online discussion, where three or four students collaborate to create a dialogue among a few important figures throughout the course.
References
Angelo, T., & Cross, K.P. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc.
Bean, J. C. (1996). Engaging ideas:the professors guide to integrating writing,critical thinking and active learning in the classroom. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
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