1. Was anything regarding this week’s content that was surprising or new for you? Explain.
It is incredibly surprising how hard it is to write an effective, comprehensive assessment that will provide you the data that you are looking for.
2. What makes creating assessments so challenging?
It is incredibly difficult to effectively assess the specific things that you want to understand that your students know. Being explicitly clear about the directions, wording your questions in a comprehensive, pertinent way, and assuring you are aligning your questions with a learning target is a lot to balance. Further, doing all this and ensuring your assessment is actually assessing for the specific data that you desire turns this into a whole art.
3. Because quality assessments are so important– what are the strategies you could implement to make creating the more manageable?
Some strategies include creating a template or pieces of templates to use, teach to the learning targets that are well thought out so that assessments more easily match content versus being disjointed, borrowing schemes from other instructors you’ve found effective, and keeping a digital, running collection of all your assessments so you can easily search, refine for later, and reuse assessments you’ve already made.
MASTER HOGAN 