Learning progress usually takes place in the brain, and hence it will be invisible to others. Learning should be assessed by kids’ teachers or parents. But, how to assess students’ learning?
You can assess students’ learning through formal, informal, individual or collective, anonymous or public assessments. However, everything has changed online; why not try to assess methods with technology? Forget the old-fashioned pencil and paper method and advance with new technology.
So… In this blog, we’ll guide you on understanding the methods to assess students’ learning. Before that, let’s discuss what assessment is.
What is Assessment?
Assessment is a process of collecting data on what students learn and experience in education. That is, it plays a significant role in evaluating kids’ learning needs and helps in improving their grades.
Types of Assessment:
Summative assessment – it is nothing but the final exam. Through this, a person can evaluate what the students have gained knowledge after the course ends.
How to assess students’ learning?
There are various ways to evaluate students’ learning progress. But, The best methods may vary based on students’ learning objectives and needs. Here we go with a brief view:
1. Online quiz
The traditional way to assess students’ learning is by conducting an online quiz. It will be pretty easy to create.
A teacher can test the students’ learning progress quickly by creating a multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and so on. Hence, as a teacher, you should randomize the quiz question and answer options to the students, preventing the kids from cheating.
However, the online quiz can be either non-graded or graded. So, you can conduct it before or after the course.
2. Essay questions
Essay questions encourage your critical thinking and are the best option for evaluating students’ learning. Compared to students, teachers can observe and evaluate a topic from different views.
Thus, add essay questions and make your assessment productive. It prompts the learners to explore their feelings, thoughts, and opinions while answering the comprehensive topic. As a teacher, you should review it one by one, and this will help you assess your students.
3. Written assignments
Give short essays, research papers, or case studies as a written assignment to the kids. Before you give a project, know all the things to consider while creating an assignment task.
- Consider what you want your students to learn in your course.
- Design assignments that are more challenging and interesting.
- Name the assignment accurately
- Schedule it
- Check the feasibility
- Specify the parameters
- Specify the intended purpose of the assignment
4. Concept maps
Concept maps are the graphical or visual representation of connections between the concepts that students have learned. It is a valuable strategy for assessing kids’ knowledge. Do you know how to design a concept map exercise? If not, follow these steps to structure the concept map for your students:
- Create a focus question.
- Tell the students to generate a list of relevant concepts and help them in constructing a preliminary map.
- Allow students to revise.
5. Online Survey
An online survey is a non-graded assessment usually assigned to measure learning satisfaction and collect feedback from students. Each question will have options ranging from disagreeing to strongly agreeing.
6. Game activities
Game activity is a type of assessment method that comes with the combination of test and game. That is, you can create an online game with challenging questions and let the kids overcome them. With this assessment, your students can enjoy the game and answer the questions without any assessment stress.
7. Drag-n-Drop Activity
One of the excellent methods to assess students’ learning is using Drag-n-Drop. That is, add some visual tasks to make your assessment more engaging. In this activity, students are required to drag a text or image and drop it in the corresponding drop-zone.
8. Forum
A forum is an online discussion board where you can organize a topic and ask the student to contribute to the discussion board in a good way. Further, in this assessment method, students will be given critical thinking questions based on the subjects that students have read through. The answers provided by the students will be posted to the discussion board, and the peers will be given a chance to respond to them.
Final words
Well, online assessments play a critical part in assessing students’ learning. Hence, it would be best if you were more careful while creating your test content. However, the good thing is, you don’t need to be more creative or a programming master to build them. There are many assessment tools accessible online. Just get them and generate engaging tasks for assessing.
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Good luck:)
