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.
Report on formative assessment test