I tried out the wiki-embedded formative assessment idea in several workshops last week.

Here is what worked well:

• It was quick and easy when people could get there easily. (See below.)
• The general results were very close to my intuition as the instructor about when people were getting it and when they weren’t, but the comments often revealed things I hadn’t sensed.
• Participants agreed that they (and their students) would be more likely to answer this and to be honest than with other methods (show of hands — I actually did a show of hands once to discuss the difference. We all agreed that 30% or so of folks won’t raise their hands no matter what you ask.)

Here is what didn’t work as well:

• It was sometimes hard to find the “assess your learning” link to do the survey. (After the first day of trying this, I moved the links to a separate sidebar, but it was still sometimes cumbersome for the class to know where to go.) This would be helped by making this a browser plug-in always on the screen. In any case, though, tying the data to a page presumes that people that are on the right page…not always the case.  (On the other hand, clickers tie the data to time, which seems more appropriate. Perhaps there is a way to do this with a plug-in and to know that “at x:xx, we were doing yyy.”)
• I had planned to do this five times during the day (6 hours of instruction), but in practice, this seemed too often. I ended up doing it only two or three times.
• In one instance where participants were really flailing, the assessment seemed demoralizing. However, based on the results, we revamped things, differentiated, and (hopefully) came out better on the other end.

So I’ve been thinking a lot and talking to people about the formative assessment idea I wrote about earlier this week. (The working name is now the “comprehension plug-in”…thanks to Chris Campbell for this great name.)

As a part of the Mozilla Open Ed course I’m participating in, we’ve been talking about assessment-related browser plug-ins, and this seems a perfect fit. In a one-to-one situation, in which most students will have a browser open all the time anyway, this is a natural. Imagine a series of LED-type buttons like this:

I like this approach to formative assessment because it moves learners toward metacognition, leading to taking control of one’s own learning.

I think this approach can be just as effective with adult learners in professional development workshops. Next week, I’m going to try this. (In addition to using this formatively, it will model the technique so that participants can think about using it in their own classrooms.)

To do this, I’ve set up a wiki for the workshop. (I use wikis for almost all my workshops now.) After each major instructional block, participants will do a quick online “how is your learning going?” survey. I will (hopefully) use this data in real-time to see how things are going and then to differentiate instruction as needed. It looks something like this:

I’ll let you know how it goes!

I’ve been brainstorming ideas for applying Web 2.0 technologies to formative assessment. Here is a useful, easy-to-implement idea:

My thought is to use this after each major instructional block of content, which depending on the class and the day, could be several times a day. I think this could be equally effective with students or in professional development. (I’m going to try it next week so I’ll let you know.)

This should be super-quick to administer and easy to get useful data from. Then, we just need to be able to differentiate instruction based on the results. And I have just the wiki for that.