Assessment is naturally an essential part of UbD and all effective course design. After all, if you do not evaluate the needs of your students, you cannot know how to design the goals and the tasks. And, since in UbD we use backward design, assessment design comes before task design. Over a few short posts, we will consider a chapter from Designing Language Courses: A Guide for Teachers (Graves, K. 2000) The chapter is Designing an Assessment Plan.
According to Graves, assessment has three important roles in course design: assessing needs, assessing students’ learning, and evaluating the course (p. 207). Additionally, assessment has two types, formative, which is ongoing during the course, and summative, which takes place after the course is completed. Graves does not address needs assessment in this article (book chapter), because it is addressed in a separate chapter in the book.
Do you regularly assess needs and evaluate the course in your classes? What is your experience?
Do you regularly use formative assessment outside achievement assessment? Specifically, I'm asking about assessment that is not included in your grading scheme.
I'm going to design a 6-point analytic rubric for my classes and format each level to fit nicely into a square.
ReplyDeleteThen I will create a 3-D representation of my assessment scale.
I shall call it my rubric cube.