So what do I do now?

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You mean I still have more to learn?

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Assessing Students...again...and again...and again...

One of the things that I had not considered before beginning this unit is the repetitive nature of some of the assignments that we have students do, and I do not say this a negative. While creating three different formative assessments and one summative assessment, I realized that one thing we do as teachers is provide means of allowing students to tackle mostly the same information in slightly different ways. As a junior high teacher in a brick and mortar classroom, I find that I do this almost without planning. Most students will never remember information that they are exposed to only once. In my classroom I often have students read and do some kind of activity with the same basic information. Add in an in-class discussion and sometimes a video clip to support the same topic, and I find that student get exposed to the same information several times. Then they study for a unit test or complete a project on the information so they have to deal with it yet again.

Just like anything, the repetition of key points will help produce mastery. The analogy that I can think of is in sports where a competitor must practice the same drill over and over and then use it in a real life situation before they become a master at it. To gain expertise in an academic topic, students must learn information and then be able to apply it in different situations in order to fully understand it. Even in this class, I find myself having to go back a re-learn something that I knew how to do two weeks ago because I hadn’t used it since then.

As I prepared a lesson plan for a strictly online environment in this module, I realized that I will have to include repetition in some of the formative assessments because I will not have the face to face time for discussions and questions that provide some of the feedback that I as an instructor use to gauge how students are progressing. I will have to create solid formative assessments so that I will be able to tell how students are doing along the way and not just rely on the outcome of the summative assessments.

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