Formative assessment tools are essential to understanding the cognitive and relational stops and starts of a course and its participants. We'd like to know more about the role of a particular formative assessment (and the patterns that emerge in it) in facilitating content and skills development through quick reflection, particularly as it is paired with deeper reflection in other assignments. Our linked questions, therefore, are:
2) Why is your central question, issue, or problem important to you and to others who might benefit from or build on your findings? Please note that the goal of the scholarship of teaching and learning is not simply to improve your own teaching, but also to contribute to the practice and profession of teaching more broadly.
This pair of questions is important so that teachers can use and interpret formative assessments to shape reflective growth and track content learning in the fullest ways possible. Simply collecting formative assessments is not enough; they lead to complex interactions: changes in course curriculum, retreads of misunderstood content, explorations on the students' parts of what kinds of things they seem to respond to positively and negatively as patterns in their own learning style. Thus, we believe studying student and teacher responses to a formal formative assessment tool across institutions and longitudinally will help us to understand the roles formative assessment plays and the most effective ways we might, as teachers, use them when particular types of reflection emerge.
2 comments:
Ah, so from your perspective our work with the CIQ is primarily a way for us to better understand the larger category of formative assessment.
Up to a point I agree. But the CIQ is (to my way of thinking) a tool concentrating on a very specific dimension of formative assessment: student engagement with the course. The CIQ isn't designed to formatively assess a student's knowledge of course content, but rather the student's level of interest in that content, which includes the student's ability to make meaningful connections between our class and others.
I honestly don't see the CIQ study (even with the portfolio) as an adequate approach to understanding "formative assessment" as you describe it here.
This is a really interesting process because, of course, for the purpose of making an incremental, publishable contribution to the scholarship of teaching and learning what we're trying to do here is narrow a multi-faceted research project into something we can meaningfully discover within, say, the next 12 months given the data we've accumulated.
I think, of all our questions, this one is clearly researchable during our near-term study:
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What does reflective growth look like in students over the course of a semester?
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And I think we could come up with *something* for the next one but I don't know that it's the best fit:
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In what observable (i.e., assess-able) ways does critical reflection contribute to a student's mastery of academic content within an academic term?
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I'm just not sure. I need to keep thinking and chatting with you--perhaps that will help clarify.
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