Program Outcome 6: "Evaluate technology resources to facilitate effective assessment and evaluation."

 

Program Outcome 7: "Utilize technology to collect and analyze data, interpret results, and communicate findings."

 

Why Evaluate? Why Assess?

 

Evaluation and assessment are crucial components in any learning activity. Why? In the article Why Is Assessment Important?, the website Edutopia outlines five major reasons. Assessment provides diagnostic feedback, it helps educators set standards, it evaluates progress, it relates to a student’s progress, and it motivates performance for self and teacher evaluation. All five of these components show the importance of making evaluations/assessments a daily part of instruction. Not every assessment, however, needs to be a test or a quiz. This is where formative and summative assessments come into the picture. Formative assessment is “to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning.” Some examples of formative assessment include questioning, exit cards, and thumbs up/thumbs down. Summative assessment is “to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark.” (Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence) Some examples of summative assessments include tests, projects, and standardized testing. Formative, in combination with summative assessments, provide a valuable foundation for both teacher and student success.

 

The project that I would like to share that targets the two PLOs above is a lesson plan about an owl pellet dissection. My project contains many different forms of assessment and demonstrates the power of using technology to assess/evaluate. Please find my project below.