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SELF-EVALUATION TESTS Purpose: The most important purpose of assessment is to help guide students to educational goals. The person most concerned in any teaching-learning situation is the student. If assessment is to be fully effective and the students are to set their goals correctly, they should participate in evaluating their own progress. Pros: Student self-assessment can help students by doing the following: Making the instructional outcomes clear to them. Showing each student how well he has progressed. Showing each student his strengths and weaknesses. Developing self-assessment skills. Creating an attitude toward objective self-assessment. Ideas for Adapting and extending this technique: For example, an evaluation technique used in an English class is to have the students criticize both their own themes and those of other students. Because the primary goal is clarity, the lecturer asks the students to read each other's themes and point out what is nor clear. Then the lecturer, or on occasion another student, tells the writer where to find a discussion of the particular error in the text or the supplementary readings. Sometimes the lecturer gives the pupils self-correcting exercises to help remedy their faults. The students work on these exercises independently until they think they have conquered the problem. Because the students know these exercises are not to be counted into their marks they feel no need to cheat. The lecturer feels that the students learn much more efficiently than they would have if she corrected each paper herself and doled out marks. Students can keep anecdotal reports and behavior logs to measure their own work. For instance, a student working on a project can keep a daily log or diary of progress and a record of successes and difficulties. In a unit, a student can submit short reports on herself at the culmination of different aspects of the work and estimate the worth of her product and the benefits she has gained from the activity. In many classes, students keep records and report "The Things I Have Done During This Unit". These reports can be free-response papers in which the students simply list what they have accomplished, or- more sophisticated papers in which the students evaluate their accomplishments. Some lecturers prepare a list of things the students call do and let the students check oft what they have done - either as they do them or as they complete the checklist at the end of the unit. Students can also keep profiles of what they have done. Such records as activity checklists and profiles are especially useful in individualized classes. The use of cameras, audiotapes and video tape recorders may make it easier for students to judge their own progress. They also make it possible for you to analyze your students' actions, to diagnose errors, and to measure progress. You call also use these devices to show students how well they are getting on and what their faults and strengths are. Coaches and physical education directors commonly use motion pictures for these purposes. Similarly, tape recorders are often used in speech classes and in the evaluation of discussions, panels, and other group activities and videotape recordings are used in the evaluation of student teachers. Students may also participate in the evaluation of their own work through conferences in which they have an opportunity to ask you for help on difficult points and you have an opportunity to evaluate their work, to point out errors, to offer encouragement, and to make diagnoses. The conferences need not he formal. A few words at your desk or at a student's workstation may serve just as well as a full-dress interview. In fact, the more informal the conference, the more valuable it is likely to be.
Summative Assessment: Tests A - Graphical Representations This form of assessment asks students to draw or label a diagram. Lecturers can gain a deeper insight into their students’ understanding of concepts. This also gives students who have difficulty expressing themselves in written form an alternative form of expression. B - Problem-solving Questions Students are asked to solve a particular problem that has many possible solutions. This will allow the lecturer to assess students’ abilities to apply new meaning to concepts, and how they are able to manipulate and apply their knowledge in different situations. C - Explanation of a Situation This form of assessment allows the lecturer to observe and assess students’ abilities to recognize concepts on a new situation, as well as their understandings of the concepts. Students are asked to explain a specific event based on their understanding of a concept. D - Explanation of a diagram The test items consist of an illustration, diagram or series of diagrams, or a graph. Students are asked to answer questions, solve problems, or explain a situation based upon them. Alternative Multiple-Choice Assessment Traditional multiple-choices answers test only whether your students know a concept, not how much they know or how they learned it. There is only one right answer, while usually relies on rote memorization. To construct alternative multiple choice items, lecturers must have information on students’ conceptions on a particular topic because the distractors are based on students’ conceptions. Development of the multiple-choice question: Step 1: List each of the prepositional statements of a specific unit of study. Step 2: Make a concept map. Step3: Relate propositional statements to the concept map to ensure internal consistency. Step4: Examine the literature to identify student’s conception. List these. Step 5: Develop multiple-choice items with free response. Each item contains a limited number of propositional statements. Each MC item is followed by a space for the student to complete the reason why the particular propositional statement was chosen. Step 6: Develop the two-tier diagnostic test. The first part of each item in the question is an MC question consisting of two or three choices. The second part of each item consists of a set of four possible reasons for the answer given to the first part. One of the reasons must be the correct reason. The other three reasons must be students’ conceptions, obtained from steps 4 and 5. NB: To earn points for an alternative multiple-choice question, the student must make the correct choice and give the correct reason. An Example in Chemistry The commercially available substance Vaseline has a smooth, thick, creamlike structure. Based on this, Vaseline would be classified as being a covalent molecular substance a covalent network (continuous covalent) substance Because The substance has a continuous linear lattice structure. The high viscosity of the substance results from the continuous covalent network. The molecules in the substance experience weak intermolecular forces and easily move to accommodate changes in the shape of the solid. The bonds within the molecules of the substance break easily to accommodate the changes in the shape of the solid.
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