When one person talks about assessments, they might mean something different to someone else. The best definition I’ve seen of assessment is from my colleague Eric Shepherd: “any systematic method of obtaining evidence by posing questions to draw inferences about the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and other characteristics of people for a specific purpose.”. Eric and I with another colleague have just published a white paper called Learning and Assessment on SharePoint. Commentary Assessment White paperFor more information, check out the white paper. MORE >>

When one person talks about assessments, they might mean something different to someone else. The best definition I’ve seen of assessment is from my colleague Eric Shepherd: “any systematic method of obtaining evidence by posing questions to draw inferences about the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and other characteristics of people for a specific purpose.”. Eric and I with another colleague have just published a white paper called Learning and Assessment on SharePoint. Commentary Assessment White paperFor more information, check out the white paper. MORE >>

The eighth of ten 'insights' is that ‘Assessment is changing', in the sense that assessment of knowledge is not enough - it is performance that matters. Automated, computer-based assessment does a pretty good job of testing for knowledge and certain cognitive skills, but it is going to tell you nothing about a person's attitude, interpersonal skills or motor skills (unless you've got some pretty impressive simulator doing the job). This post continues my commentary to the Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine. Simple. insights MORE >>

Therefore, designing a component of your assessment scheme devoted to discussion will be wise choice. In some courses it is difficult to avoid having a term paper in the assessment scheme – so plagiarism can become attractive to students in this scenario. Build into your assessment scheme that each student will select one first draft from a classmate and perform a critique on it. The pressure to score well on such a high stake assessment can be crushing for many students. assessments plagiarism instructional designWho says Facebook is a useless waste of time? MORE >>

Writing good assessments is hard. Extensions that are high value include problem generators and randomness in the order of options (challenging attempts to ‘game’ the assessment). greater variety of response options for novelty isn’t bad either, and automarking is desirable for at least a subset of assessment. While SMEs can write content and even examples (if they get pedagogical principles and are in touch with the underlying thinking, but writing good assessments is another area. Are we seeing the demise of for-profit institutions and publishers? MORE >>