Dilemma 2
How can I judge when to give authentic feedback, scaffolding and assistance to individuals and collaborative groups ?
How can you make the decision when to interject, assist and help a student or group? Too soon and the student doesn’t use their anxiety created by their dilemma for learning and becomes dependent upon others to provide the answers. Too soon and you can stop peer interaction. Too late and you risk abandonment by the student who finds it all too hard to cope with.
How can I judge when to give authentic feedback, scaffolding and assistance to individuals and collaborative groups ?
How can you make the decision when to interject, assist and help a student or group? Too soon and the student doesn’t use their anxiety created by their dilemma for learning and becomes dependent upon others to provide the answers. Too soon and you can stop peer interaction. Too late and you risk abandonment by the student who finds it all too hard to cope with.
Too much in the way of learning activities and authentic assessments and students are too busy coping with the workload to be able to interact.
Too little work to cover and people will lose interest.
Asynchronous feedback can miss the moment but can also allow time to prepare feedback and research answers.
Synchronous discussion allows for instant feedback but little time to plan it.
Some students join an asynchronous discussion almost daily and others once a week or so. It becomes an individual programme for each person and their needs. If you respond in a timely way to one student you may not be timely for the next.
Forcing people to interact with a set number of posts can create an overload and anxiety. Formal assessment of online discussions can stop people freely expressing themselves.
What about the problem of assessing ‘lurkers’?
How can you control the feedback that is given by peers?
Peer feedback in asynchronous chat has a social aspect to it and at times is informative. People are able to add new references or experiences or ideas. This depends on how well you post a discussion. Sometimes you can leave no room for feedback or be so far away from the topic that it becomes irrelevant for feedback. Most feedback however is uninformative and not really a discussion. Although it may be socially relevant and create social presence, it can create a burden of work.
The quality of the peer group is also important and it really only takes one difficult person in a group to alter the mood of the group towards work or otherwise.
Planning authentic assessment.
Some Questions to consider.
In what context is the assessment and the learning?
Who are the stakeholders ?
What are the individual issues for the evaluand ?(one being evaluated)
What values and criteria are important?
How will you do the data collection and analysis?
In what format will you report results?
Can you make it easy to do, time and cost efficient?
How accurate, valid, reliable is the assessment?
What are the cultural issues to consider?
(Williams, 2005)
What other issues can you think of?
.
Some ideas to enhance online discussions-
An introductory class activity and ice- breaker could incorporate a class activity that designs the assessment rubric. It may end up wasting a lot of time but would encourage ownership.
Give examples and information about the expected quality of discussions, netiquette, expected length, attachments, referencing, use of reflection and readings required.
Personalize the discussion with multimedia, photos and voice recordings.
Be aware that different cultures, languages and philosophies exist, especially in globalized classrooms. People have dial-up and different bandwidths and different levels of technological and computer literacy.
Social presence is important to foster for each member of the learning community.
(Zemsky & Massy 2004)
Further Reading:
Zemsky, R & Massy, WF (2004) Thwarted Innovation-what happened to e-learning and why? The Learning Alliance Report
Retrieved 12/5/2007
http://www.thelearningalliance.info/Docs/Jun2004/ThwartedInnovation.pdf
In what context is the assessment and the learning?
Who are the stakeholders ?
What are the individual issues for the evaluand ?(one being evaluated)
What values and criteria are important?
How will you do the data collection and analysis?
In what format will you report results?
Can you make it easy to do, time and cost efficient?
How accurate, valid, reliable is the assessment?
What are the cultural issues to consider?
(Williams, 2005)
What other issues can you think of?
.
Some ideas to enhance online discussions-
An introductory class activity and ice- breaker could incorporate a class activity that designs the assessment rubric. It may end up wasting a lot of time but would encourage ownership.
Give examples and information about the expected quality of discussions, netiquette, expected length, attachments, referencing, use of reflection and readings required.
Personalize the discussion with multimedia, photos and voice recordings.
Be aware that different cultures, languages and philosophies exist, especially in globalized classrooms. People have dial-up and different bandwidths and different levels of technological and computer literacy.
Social presence is important to foster for each member of the learning community.
(Zemsky & Massy 2004)
Further Reading:
Zemsky, R & Massy, WF (2004) Thwarted Innovation-what happened to e-learning and why? The Learning Alliance Report
Retrieved 12/5/2007
http://www.thelearningalliance.info/Docs/Jun2004/ThwartedInnovation.pdf
4 comments:
Hi Joyce - in this section there seemed to be two different questions, one about authentic assessment and one about catering for differences and "class management" in the online environment - how to manage groups and the associated issues.
In terms of the dilemma, I think that scaffolding should always be provided, but especially so for novice learners. This creates clear expectations and clear requirements for students.
In terms of feedback, I think it depends what sort of feedback you are thinking about. Feedback of a supportive, encouraging nature should be always available, feedback on specific content or assessment questions, it depends on the question - for a technical or clarification question, I think immediately, but for content or conceptual or theoretical, if you hold off a day or two, it gives students and peers time to contemplate it. In terms of assessment specific feedback, or progress-related feedback, preferably in a formative element of the assessment before the final submission date, and final post-assessment feedback.
Assistance to groups or individuals working through course materials and issues should be offered when they are clearly veering off track, when they request assistance, or when there are group management problems that cannot be resolved by the group.
Thanks for your thoughts which are quite deep.
Novice learners need scaffolding to learn how to learn. Does this mean that mature age or higher academic learners need less? Can we hope that they may find their own path? Do we need to frustrate them a little more?
There are differences between group feedback and individual feedback. Is this based on the use of peer feedback to create group cphesion and networking as well as social learning?
I appreciate your input and find it rather good feedback for me in this authentic learning project.
Joyce
I think that tied in with this dilemma is an underlying dilemma that I don't think you've teased out - how much assessment is enough? And in turn, how much content is enough for one subject?
In an Australian vocational education subject, this is easy, because it's defined by the competency, but in higher education it's much less clear.
I think the more higher education heads into authentic assessment, the more it hits up against this issue. When assessment is just about regurgitating facts, predominantly in an exam, you define how many facts you want students to learn, and that's that. But once you want students to engage more deeply with concepts, and maybe discuss them with others, and learn from others, and teach others, and complete authentic projects... I think less becomes desirable. But how much less? And what are the implications of less?
Take what we're doing right now. As much as there is great value in writing the seminar paper for this subject, there is a tension between participating in as many people's events as possible and writing the paper by June 1. There is a huge amount of learning to be gained from both, but it's virtually impossible to do both as well as possible - something has to give somewhere.
And yet on the surface, the assessment for this subject does not appear excessive. What makes it much more time-consuming than simply completing one assignment and sitting an exam is the work we all put into it, precisely because it's authentic, and the fact that we share that, which in turn translates into much greater learning. The more assessment items that have to be completed, though, the more it takes away from that ability to gain maximum learning.
Thanks for your input Sharon
How much assessment is the right amount? any takers?
Perhaps learning is more important than assessment, although on the other hand, we have to validate our learning, units of study and ultimatley degrees.
I personally feel happy if I learnt something as I have in both setting up this blog and in taking part in other events.
So long as I pass the unit so that I can progress through the course, the final grade is not as important.
Most people, however work to achieve a good grade which suits the obsessional and perfectionists,imp;ies competitivenss, hence the conflict.
The same balance of co-operation and competitivness exists in the real world.
So the question you pose extends to not only how much is enough, but how much do you need to do to sustain standards and how much are grades, other than pass or fail, important.
Are there any other points that we can add to this discussion?
Joyce
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