To assess, or not to assess
April 7, 2008 by liping
To assess, or not to assess, this is a question.
I have had this debate with myself for a while and my perspective on this matter changed over time. A discussion with Nicole after a seminar we went to ignited it again. I guess it will be worthwhile to record my change here.
I used to be a quite strong opponent of forced participation for students. I believed in that students will benefit more if they are engaged in the authentic activities to their genuine interest. The ideal situation is that students are driven by the internal motivation instead of the external motivation. I used to feel it was kinda pathetic or sad to force students into online discussion.
On the other hand, we all know that the online community will not take shape just by creating an online forum. Social infrastructure such as goals, rules and facilitators, can play an critical role. A case I was involved in my work set me to rethink about this required participation. A teacher in our faculty is a very experienced online facilitator. She is dedicated and skillful. The course she taught in the past had successful online discussion when the online participation was given extra point. When the online discussion became voluntary, she got the participation problem. So here, we have similar students population, same great online facilitator, but the online discussion failed to take off.
There are many factors that influenced students’ online participation, some are related to individual student, some are related to the course. To form a self-organizing online community, or having online discussion out of free will, there are many conditions to meet. For example, students need to be mature learners who believe in peer learning . On account of this, maybe such self-organizing online community will be more possible with post-graduate students who are more self-initiative, resourceful and reflective.
But for those teachers of the undergraduate students who wanted to promote online discussion among their students, what can they do? If they don’twant to leave the online discussion to chance, assessment might be an effective measure. It might be argued that the best solution might be to promote the inner need for peer learning. Then it comes down to how to make students willing and ready for online learning? In this respect, there are several barriers. For example, it takes time to change one’s epistemology. It’s impossible to change students’ perception and attitude overnight. In addition, the subjective teacher can’t spend much time on this as well. So to show students that peer learning might be useful and valuable, one way is to get them into it and try it out themselves. So the means might not be graceful, but the ends might be good.
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That reminds me my experience of writing “weekly diary” as an assignment to my teachers when I was in school days. We supposed to write our reflection during the week. I tended to write many pages because I was quite conscious about my feeling and stuffs. Well, but many of my classmates would just simply fake their weekly diary. It was a torturing task really. On the other hand, my teachers comment were kinda discouraging somehow. Like I tended to write relationship matters on the diary and the teachers would usually say, “focus on school work….blah blah”…..
But i guess a learning diary/blog is a lot different from those weekly diary that I have done in the past.