Assessing Students' Comprehension Via Technology: Twitter (Comer, 2011)

Reflection 2

This article is about assessing students' learning through various means of alternative assessment. Students' learning can be taken to mean their interests and comprehension. Here, I would like to draw your attention to the proposed means of using Twitter to assess students' comprehension. as Helderman (2003) in Comer's article has stated, "students today are accustomed to translating their every thought and feeling into words". As a result, using tweets to convey how they feel is a relatable form of assessment for students. As every tweet has a limited word count, students have to summarise what they learn by only focusing at the key points to talk about. To add on to Comer's analysis, I think it is rather interesting and different to assess students through their tweets. Students could do multiple tweets to focus on explaining their points on a certain topic should they wish to, instead of just typing out a summary of what they have learnt in a single tweet, which is equivalent to a longer sentence. 

However, to summarize the storyline from a particular character's point of view may be somewhat limited for us in evaluating students' understanding of what we have taught them, so what I propose would be to give students a specific topic to discuss about via tweeting. For example, if students are studying on Animal Farm, they could be asked to do their reviews of their own learning every week through tweeting. One week's tweeting assignment could be to "Discuss whether Napolean is a ruthless leader", and the other week's tweeting assignment could be to "Consider why Snowball is always framed by Napolean". Here, students could do a regular tweeting assignment that not only does not take as long as structuring and writing an essay, but could also easily read their fellow classmates' tweets and reply to it to give feedback or ask questions. 

However, to follow up on developing their answers, I feel that ultimately, getting students to tweet is not enough. Instead, they have to structure their own arguments and their essays eventually, as essay writing is an integral part of Literature assessment. What we can get students to do is perhaps alternate between tweeting and blogging, since blogging their answers allow them to further develop their points and answers, as well as to practice organizing their essay answers. My stance is that twitter cannot be used as a single form of assessment, but when combined with other forms of technology like using blogs, they can be brought to a more traditional form of thinking and analysing literature through means that are culturally relevant to them. 

Velvet