Module 4 - Reflections

Mid-term Team Activity
I have worked in groups previously and have had some cases where all team members did not do their fair share or where there were problems deciding who would do want and how. When you do happen to get motivated and cooperative team members working on team assignments can be such as pleasure – as it was for me working on my mid-term with my group. I was very fortunate to have been placed in the team that I have was for this assignment. I believe that our team worked together well, communicated well and that we each did our assigned work well.

My Chosen Assessment Tool
For my research part of the team I looked into the survey tools for assessment. This was an interesting and fun assignment for me! In my face-to-face Developmental Psychology class for next week we will be discussing parenting styles and discipline. I developed a Zoomerang survey that had a pre-built template for educators. I was able to design a survey to find out students perceptions and ideas in regards to discipline as well as the demographics of the students. I wanted to use this information as a springboard for discussion and for their discipline research paper. I explained to my students why I was collecting the data and explained to them how I would use it. Most of the students were very willing to complete the survey and were very interesting in the results. After my class discussion next week I will include how this survey worked with this assignment! I am anxious about it. The students were also given extra credit points to complete the survey. I have included the link to the results. I’m not sure how long the results will be available. http://app.zoomerang.com/Report/ResultsPage.aspx?qn=1

Readings
I thought that this week’s readings were great! It is too bad that a discussion board was not put out to discuss the articles. For some of the previous articles I had a hard time finding topics that I really had an interest in discussing. Not so for these articles. As I read I normally highlight topics that I find interesting and I have many parts of these articles highlighted!

I will mention just a few of the topics from the readings that I thought were interesting. From the “Assessment and Online Teaching” http://pre2005.flexiblelearning.net.au/guides/assessment.pdf Article: providing assessment choices – something that I had not previously considered. Also the report discussed as a key issue the importance in “identifying what assessment methods can effectively be transferred to or be done better or differently alone” They also mentioned as a challenge how to measure individual performances with a group assignment.

I was surprised to read that there are counterviews to the benefits or validity of requiring students to participate in online chats, discussion forums, etc.. One of the dilemmas that they mentioned was that of assessing students participation in a fair and equitable way and how should this be qualified. I thought this was interesting because there are always people who will go way beyond what is required in the discussions and those who not. There are also those people who get angry (just like in a face-to-face class) at those people who “hog” the discussion.

From the Edutopia online article www.glef.org I enjoyed reading about applied learning and using rubrics to assess this. They stated that a well defined rubric is one that “both the student and the teacher clearly understand the criteria upon which the work is evaluated.” I agree with this however this can be a problem. In the article they gave an example of watching Julia Child make a soufflé… but the real test is to make on yourself. It reminded me of the cookie rubric that I participated in years ago. We came up with criteria to rate the cookie, size, texture, # of chips, and taste. The problem with this, as is with all rubrics, we have to take into consideration subjectivity. Not all of the participants in the cookie experiment agreed with the taste criteria – which is probably the most important aspect of judging food!