CMS Assessment

In CEP 813 this week, I explored another Content Management System (CMS): Edmodo. One thing that I really like about Edmodo is the quiz feature. The quiz feature allows me to ask multiple questions, and the questions can be different formats (multiple choice, true/false, matching, fill in the blank, or short answer). The quiz provides immediate feedback from all questions except short answer questions, which require me to grade and enter feedback. This seems to me to be the best of both worlds – students get immediate feedback where appropriate and detailed feedback where appropriate.

Alignment with my Assessment Design Checklist

This assessment is designed to identify a student’s level of understanding. The questions require varied levels of understanding: one is a multiple choice question where the student has to only apply a strategy, and the other question is short answer and requires the student to explain a strategy. The context of the multiple choice question is different from what the students used in class and on the homework, so this assessment also assesses students’ ability to transfer what they learned in class to a new context.

This assessment captures important learning goals. Calculating and understanding percentages is a lifelong skill. Students are often given percent grades on quizzes and projects throughout their school years. Percentages are also common in everyday life (tax, tips, discounts), so are important to understand.This assessment also aligns with the Common Core State Standard CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.6.RP.A.3.C: “Find a percent of a quantity as a rate per 100 (e.g., 30% of a quantity means 30/100 times the quantity); solve problems involving finding the whole, given a part and the percent.”

This assessment gives me feedback about my teaching. It will tell me whether students understand what I taught in the previous lesson. If students cannot calculate this percent or explain how to calculate a percent, I will know that I need to teach the material again in a different way. If some students understand, but a good amount of students do not understand, I will know to reteach the concept to some students while allowing the students that understood to take the concept deeper.

This assessment allows me to give my students good feedback about their learning. Feedback will be provided for both the multiple choice question and the first short answer question. The multiple choice question will give students immediate feedback. The short answer question will require that I type feedback for each student, but this feedback will be better tailored to each student’s understanding. This assessment will not be counted towards student grades. The students will be assessed on this material on the end-of-unit test, so this is a good opportunity for students to receive and read through this feedback. This should improve their understanding.

This assessment is a chance for students to self-regulate. I ask them to assess what they believe their understanding is at the end of this assessment. When they receive feedback, they will be able to determine whether their self-assessment matches their demonstrated understanding on the assessment. If they are not satisfied with their self-assessment, they still have the opportunity to improve their understanding before the end-of-unit test.

Using affordances of Edmodo

Edmodo has a quiz feature, unlike some other CMS’s. This makes it convenient to ask more than one question, which allows me to assess at multiple levels, in accordance with my Assessment Design Checklist. The quiz feature gives students one question at a time, so it is less likely to overwhelm a student than a paper quiz, in which a student can see every question. Another affordance is the feedback feature. For the multiple choice question, Edmodo will provide feedback to the student immediately; this lets the student know right away if they understand or not. For short answer questions, Edmodo requires that I enter the feedback, which allows me to communicate to the student much deeper feedback about what they understand and what next steps might be.

One constraint that I discovered is that Edmodo requires all questions to be worth a point value – it is impossible to set the point value to 0. One of the questions on this assessment simply requires students to self-assess their understanding. I would prefer to not make this question worth any points. I decided to make this question a short answer question; originally I made it a multiple choice question to make the choices clear to the students, but I don’t want the quiz to provide immediate feedback about right/wrong answers because this question does not have a right/wrong answer. I am able to leave it ungraded as a short answer question, but this will still factor into the student’s overall score on the quiz.

Purpose and context of this assessment

This assessment will happen the day after teaching a lesson about calculating percentages (see CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.6.RP.A.3.C in the second paragraph of this blog post). The students will have engaged with a lesson and the homework that goes with the lesson.

The purpose of this assessment is twofold: to evaluate how well each student understood the previous day’s lesson and how well the class as a whole understood the previous lesson. This assessment will let me know if I need to reteach this content to the whole class, part of the class, or a few individual students. It will also communicate to students whether they understand the material or need to spend some more time with the material. Because this assessment will happen prior to the unit test, students will benefit from receiving this preliminary feedback on their learning of calculating percentages.

My CMS assessment

In this screencast, I show the assessment that I designed in Edmodo and explain the purpose, context, and reasoning behind the design.

References:

Edmodo. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.edmodo.com/

Grade 6 » Ratios & Proportional Relationships. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/6/RP/