Assessment and feedback
Student growth is the focus of education. Evaluating student growth is conducted with formative and summative assessments.
The goal of formative assessment is to gauge student progress throughout a unit of study. Formative assessments help students and instructors understand which concepts students need more practice to reach mastery. Because it is an additional workload for the instructor to monitor understanding during a unit of learning, formative assessment does not have to be graded for accuracy. When students understand that these assessments are not graded for accuracy, they are free to try and "fail" until they reach a true understanding of the material. With formative assessment, students rely on feedback, so they learn how to improve. Formative assessments encourage growth mindset and develop skills that students will be able to use throughout school and into the workforce.
Formative assessment examples show students can:
- Complete practice problems in OneNote
- Complete a poll, practice quiz, entrance/exit ticket in Forms
- Summarize their understanding of a video lesson or live lesson in OneNote
- Complete a graphic organizer using the Whiteboard app
- Answer questions related to a concept in Word.
Summative assessments are typically at the end of a unit of learning and measure students' mastery of the content. While formative assessment is not graded for accuracy and relies on instructor feedback, summative assessment is graded and final. Objective tests and essays are traditional summative assessments. Instructors can also utilize other assessment strategies to measure students' growth, including:
- Demonstrations: Instructors can task students with demonstrating their mastery of a concept by teaching it. Students can use Sway, PowerPoint, or Video Editor to teach an assigned topic to a specified audience. Students can also use Flipgrid or the Screen Recorder feature in PowerPoint or Stream to record themselves teaching a concept, explaining a process, or walking through the steps of how to solve a problem.
- Portfolios: Students can document their learning in OneNote. Students can reflect on their learning, self-assess, and provide authentic examples of their progress. At the end of the unit of learning, students can use their portfolio to write a response to an overarching essential question or respond to a Flipgrid prompt.
- Problem-based tasks: Instructors can give students or student groups real-world authentic problems to solve in a unit of learning. Throughout the course of study, educators would pose an authentic problem for students to solve and students would apply the content they are learning to the problem posed. Problem-based learning provides students with a purpose and engages them in meaningful work. Students feel a sense of responsibility, value, and independence when they focus on solutions to real-world questions. (Nsiah, 3).
Assessment is only one piece of measuring student growth. Meaningful and timely feedback is a key component to success in a hybrid learning environment. "If we want online students to actively engage with the course, we have to engage them as frequently as possible through fair and helpful feedback" (Darby 111). Meaningful feedback is feedback that helps students improve and grow in the learning goals. Instructors need to provide students with details of how they did on the current assignment, but also how they can improve for future assignments. To offer feedback effectively and efficiently, educators can use a number of strategies:
- Audio feedback in OneNote: Using Assignments in Microsoft Teams, instructors can distribute a OneNote page to students. When finished, educators can use the Insert Audio feature to offer feedback. Not only does audio feedback help instructors provide meaningful feedback in a timely manner, students report greater satisfaction when they receive audio feedback. According to Small Teaching Online, students "indicated an increased satisfaction with audio feedback; it felt more personal, they reported, and they found it to be more useful because the audio feedback included more explanation and suggestions for improvement than the written feedback did" (Darby 124).
- Notes in Forms Quizzes: Instructors can insert messages within a Forms practice quiz to provide feedback as the student completes the quiz. If the student answers incorrectly, the feedback feature in Forms can direct the student to a specific page or video that helps them find the answer to the question. If the student answers correctly, the feedback can send the student to a resource with additional information to challenge them further. Creating notes within the quiz allows instructors to be virtual tutors for their students as they practice concepts.
- Feedback cycles with Assignments in Teams: Instructors can create an assignment in Microsoft Teams, requiring students to submit their final work through the Team. Once submitted, educators can review students' work and provide feedback. When the feedback is returned to students, they can modify their work based on the instructor’s feedback and resubmit.