November: Online Assessment Reflection

November: Online Assessment Reflection

Our team has been cobbling together assessments to not only assess our student’s understanding of Common Core State Standards in literacy, but to also prepare them for the format of the test.

We started the year distributing paper packets of texts that were designed to take three days to comprehend. Students were expected to use their highlighters to mark the text using Notice and Note signposts, then explain their thinking in caption form.

Pros:  Standardized reading passages for entire grade level, concrete evidence of student understanding

Cons:  Paper intensive, time intensive for teacher to make a packet of copies for each student at grade level for three classes, difficult for students to manage returned work, and difficult to give realtime feedback and/or score so many packets daily by the teacher.

We then advanced to creating a Google Site for assessments.  One person would retype the reading passage, the team or one person would draft questions aligned to the state standard and finally another person would create a Google Form with the agreed questions which were aligned by State Standard.

Pros:  Standardized passages for the grade level that were at or above grade level, questions aligned to State Standards, passages/assessments can be tweaked and/or reused next year, results can be examined by multiple teachers at multiple times right away or after the fact.

Cons:  Teacher time to retype an entire passage, students getting timed out of form before submitting their response, formatting of Google Site not consistent teacher-to-teacher or assessment to assessment, viewable screensize an issue for students if two items are embedded on page, scrolling down on embedded passages and/or embedded Google Forms can be an issue for students.

Finally we learned that another school was using an app called CamScanner for their reading passages, then inserting a link to the .pdf file on either a Google Site or Google Doc for assessments.  We also decided to focus assessment on certain “biggest bang for the buck” standards instead of trying to assess each standard every month.

Pros:  Standardized passages for the grade level that were at or above grade level, questions aligned to State Standards, passages/assessments can be tweaked and/or reused next year, results were examined by multiple teachers at multiple times right away or after the fact, formulas were created to organize responses on Google Sheets to make it easier to determine student command of standards

Cons:  Blurry images either from low level of webcam or photographer when the pdf is created, wavy images when the image is opened, no numbering of each line in a passage, page numbers that are referred to in lesson do not appear in images, unsure of copyright conflict.

We will start off the year scanning in the reading passages that we made copies of in 14-15, and "tweaking" our assessments by standards in order to create needs-based student groups.