Title: Directing assessment at supporting learning
Abstract: This paper describes an attempt to use assessment activities in a course to support student and improve the quality of the students’ experience. It aims to show that assessment activities can be more than devices for merely measuring the achievement of outcomes. Innovative use of assessment tasks can serve to and indeed enrich the quality of the student experience. Assessment activities that are able to lead to such outcomes mirror the sorts of activities that students are likely to be doing while in professional practice. As such, they provide students with training that they will need for professional practice. This paper seeks to illustrate how some of these types of goals are being pursued in a graduate level course that is offered exclusively in an online distance education format. On supporting student A great deal of work has gone on in supporting student in open and flexible educational settings in various ways, and with various technologies (see for example, Bates, 1990, Collis, 1996, and Khan, 1997). These authors survey several technologies including print, radio, audiocassettes, telephone, computer-based applications such as electronic databases and CD-ROMs, computermediated communication technologies (i.e., e-mail, computer conferencing, bulletin boards, audio and video conferencing, broadcast television, and the Internet. Many of these technologies are ideal vehicles for content delivery and supporting communication, but in themselves, they are lacking in the capability to support or student activity. A learning scaffold is best described as a transitional support strategy” which is put in place to guide student in desirable directions, or to enable the development of desirable cognitive skills in students. The expectation is that when this is removed from the context, the targeted skills become part of a learner's repertoire of skills. Parents or human teachers are excellent examples of scaffolds. Among other things of course, they are there to provide advice and support when these are most needed. At some point in the child’s cognitive development these types of support are progressively removed and as such are no longer accessible or accessible to them only in limited ways. Children go on to live and function in society independently of the support and advice previously provided by their parents and teachers. Learners in open, distance and flexible environments who work independently with selfinstructional study materials, need help with the organization and management of their learning, as well as the skills to critically reflect on information they may have gathered. While a great deal of work has gone on in supporting student in such settings with various forms of technology and local centre-based support, work is lagging in the area of cognitive supports for student in open, distance and flexible environments (see for instance McLoughlin, 2002). Directing assessment at Research in and cognitive sciences has shown that an effective way to teach new skills to learners is to put them in the kinds of situations in which they need to use those skills, and to provide mentors (i.e., expert practitioners) who are able to help learners as and when necessary (Schank, & Cleary, 1995). Through this engagement, learners come to understand when, why, and how they should use targeted skills on the job. They receive key lessons just-in-time, which is when they want the information, when it will make the most sense to them, and in a way that they will be most likely to remember the information for later use when they need it in their work. Schank and Cleary (1995) argue that the design of such a experience takes the form of a storyline in which students play a key role such as being a manager of an e-business or e-learning organization. These roles are carefully selected to reflect those that students of such a program might actually do in real life, or might need to know about because they might manage or collaborate with others who might be performing those roles. Students work in small groups in these scenarios with the help of detailed information about the simulated context, together with project details. Supporting materials and resources are also available, and online mentors are available to answer questions and point students in the right direction on a needs basis (Schank, 1990; 1997). This is the main point behind the story-centered curriculum (SCC) popularized by Roger Schank and his colleagues (Schank, Fano, Jona, & Bell, 1994). The story in this instance is the simulated context in which the student plays a key role. The story in this curriculum serves as the essential scaffold. These researchers argue that stories have always been a part of human existence. Humans have always told stories, and the most powerful of all stories shape the way in which we relate to our world. Furthermore, we tend not to forget these life-changing stories. There is good reason then to make powerful stories the centre of educational practices. These stories must involve students as well as their peers, because that is how their work situation is most likely to be. A story-centered curriculum is goal-based, and the goals are those that the student has for entering school and following a curriculum in the first place. A story-centered curriculum is also activity-based. Students work through these activities to learn the critical skills they require in order to complete their mission and successfully accomplish their goals (Naidu, Oliver, & Koronios, 1999). This is what is at the heart of the concept of “learning-by-doing”. Learning designs such as these focus attention on improving the quality of the student experience. They ensure that the student experience is situated in authentic activities that reflect real life situations, that it is meaningful, and therefore inherently motivating for the student.
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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