Sunday, October 4, 2009
Assessing student learning
I have a feeling this may be a somewhat contraversial topic: assessing student learning, especially with PBL. My personal thought is that PBL learning is much more time consuming to assess and that it can and should be used, but should probably be used sparingly, as it is so time consuming to assess. Creating real products are a great authentic idea, but take a lot longer to assess than a standard pen-and-paper test. In real life, teachers have lives outside of school and cannot grade every unit as a PBL--it's just not realistic. I think PBL is good to use (in my case as a high school teacher) once or maybe twice a semester. More than this and I think the teacher will get burned out having to grade assignments that require a lot of thought to score correctly. In an ideal situation, PBL would be a great method to use all the time, but given reality with time constraints and the reality of standardized testing, there's only so much time available for assessing PBL projects.
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I agree with time,, I have been reading a lot on this topic do to its my research question for another class, and have found some alternative ideas. What I have discovered this year in working in a PBL environment, is that I spend a lot of time reading their work and responding back frequently. Yes, it is much more beneficial for the student and I can see that, but I am grading more than I ever did when I taught in a traditional mode. It just takes time and planning. That is the key. Each day I have to re work and redesign how I am going to implement that different part of the unit. If I was teaching a year long course it would be more difficult. As it is, I can see what needs to be changed and alter it the next 9 weeks.
ReplyDeleteI agree that PBL assessment is much more time consuming. I think there is a way to do more PBL without spending a lot of extra time grading. Grading could be informal during the project and then more in depth for the final product. Although PBL is a great way to teach, teachers just don't have the time to put in work up front to really make the learning experience meaningful for students. It would take more time and effort for the teacher and that is hard to find!
ReplyDeleteOK we all agree that it takes a lot of time to get off the ground. That's just the thing though, doing it that first time. It takes a great deal of time the first time that you do a project with a group of students, but once you have the plan down and assessments created, it should be ready to go for many rounds in semesters and years to follow. If it's good it'll also be available and accessible to colleagues for sharing and swapping. I don't know, I do look forward to hearing more opinions on your argument, because I do agree.
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