Young Adult Literature and Alternative Assessment
Measures by Melissa Comer, offers a perspective on assessment – Assessment “is
not to arrive at a grade for students”, but “to inform the educator as to what
needs to be addressed in the classroom” (239). This line aptly sums up what
most of us think when we talk about assessments, and it is a good reminder of
what assessment truly is.
One of the alternative assessments that the Comer
suggests is the use of ICT tools – Cyber-hunts and Twitter. Like a game of
“scavenger hunt”, Cyber-hunt requires students to search for information using
the internet, pertaining to the questions which are based on a certain theme of
topic (242). This form of assessment seems to test student’s ability to make
connections with various pieces of information to form meaningful
understanding.
The use of Twitter for assessment on the other hand is
more straightforward. According to Comer, it can be used to assess student’s
understanding of a novel by getting them to “summarize the storyline from a
particular character’s point of view” and so “forc[es] them to look at the key
points” (243).
In my opinion, including these forms of ICT tools as
part of assessment presents a pragmatic attempt to connect with students,
knowing that this is “their…world”, and so perhaps increasing their level of
enthusiasm for class as well (242).
The ICT tools, especially the Cyber-hunt, promote
critical thinking among students considering that they have to select relevant
information and justify their choice. This forces teachers to move away from
just assessing students for content but also the process of trying to arrive at
a particular understanding. I feel that this approach is more holistic, as we
cannot always assess students based on the end product. However, I do
understand that this can be rather difficult because if students do not answer
the question, it will be difficult for me to assess the student solely on the
process that he went through. Another problem with this activity is the reliability
of information on the Internet. Most young students will find information that
they want and would disregard the credibility of source. Therefore, the
information that they get may not be accurate or even be false. Therefore, this
highlights another difficulty when assessing student’s understanding using this
particular tool.
Similarly, Twitter allows students to condense the
information and pick out relevant points that summarize the whole novel. Again,
students have to evaluate which points are important and which are not, and so
promoting a level of critical thinking in them. However, a key problem that I have
with Twitter is the limited number of characters that students can type per
tweet (150 characters). What if there are a number of key points of equal
importance? How are students to put them together in such a restricted amount
of “space”? Students would be concern in squeezing these points in the tweet
and forget about its coherence. Furthermore in written assessments, we want
students to elaborate points, providing evidence. However, tweeting is a
totally opposite thing!
Despite the problems of ICT tools, I feel that they
represent the future of assessment. However, I am particularly interested in
finding out more about Twitter and its potential to be a good mode of
assessment in class. Other than its use to assess student’s critical thinking
through the selection of information in tweeting concise novel summary, I am
sure there are other key uses of Twitter as a mode of assessment.
No comments:
Post a Comment