Excellent response and what you describe in your interior design course parallels my course closely. All of my courses utilize one or more of the Autodesk softwares and the majority a student's grade comes from drawing assignmnets.
Students who enroll in CAD programs tend to visual learners who do quite well in any form of grading that employs visual attributes.
HI Joanna - Welcome to Ed 103! In a discipline like Interior design it does take a delicate balance of assessment types to be able to get a clear picture of where your students are. Sounds like you are doing a good job at it! Best wishes for continued success in your teaching career. Susan
Our students are Interior Design majors, so a good amount of our tests are visual products (boards, drafting sheets, AutoCad, etc). However there are a number of classes that we teach where we need to test them is more traditional manners. Typically I try to incorporate a visual element into my tests, but for these non traditional Interior Design class I try and do a mix of multiple choice, short answer, true and false, in order to test a wide range of students.
Knowing the learning styles of students will faciltate curriculum development.
I teach computer application courses and select textbooks that are tutorial in style and use standardized tests supplied by the publisher. I find that true/false, multiple choice and matching questions work best as long as I am certain the material is adequately in the course content. The supplied test banks afford the instructor the option of altering or adding questions as warranted and I have used this method both in the classroom and online course environment.
HI Anthony- Thanks for your post to the forum! You are obviously very skilled at reading your students and choosing appropriate assessments for them. Great work! Susan
I think short-answers add more to the student's understanding of what is beign taught. It helps the instructor to quickly find out where to improve on.
I tend to tailor the testing method to the specific class, more objective in the Algebra classes and more subjective in the English classes. I do try to throw in one or two alternative testing activities throughout the term because my students come from a variety of different areas, graphic design, film and video, information technology, and game design. In a College Algebra class, for example, some students will do quite well on an objective test because of the nature of their program (logic and problem solving)tend to be a "fit" for information technology students; while the higher order bigger picture explanatory nature of an essay test tends to be the "fit" for a lot of my film and video students. With a fairly consistent variety of backgrounds, the perfect test for all students never seems to materialize; but I can at least try to make up for that a bit by including some alternative testing methods throughout the class.
Hello Lyn!
Thank you for the very nice post. I also believe that the time the the test matters. A test early in the course may want to go over vocabulary and terms, thus a completion assessment would be valuable. While you may want to conduct an essay assessment at the end of the course.
Jim
The main criteria should be the content and level of learning you are trying assess. As stated in the course, if you are assessing vocabulary and memorization then a completion assessment would work. If you are testing higher learning skills such as analysis and synthesis, a essy assessment might be better.
Jim
I find that short answer tests give me the best feed back as to what was learned and how well I presented the information.
I try to use a wide variety in order to try to accommodate all of the different learning styles of the students.
Test should be geared toward the information the instructor was providing. I believe various forms of test within the same subject may increase the retention of the information you are trying to deliever.
It really depends on the class. I teach Culinary and Wine classes. In my wine classes it is more factual information. In culinary it is technique based, less factual. I find that matching is great for my wine classes in tests and Essay questions are great for Culinary as they write out the technique on paper.
HI Rick - Welcome to ED 103! Your assessment plan does seem to be quite comprehensive! Best wishes for continued success in your teaching career. Susan
I the culinary field I perfer skill ased testing
I use a range of testing formats, since I have a wide range of students and learning abilities. Essays are inappropriate in my field, and I find many of my young students have difficulty with that sort of test, which is why they decided to major in my field of study. The tests I develop always have multiple choice, true/false, completion and short answer components. By varying the types of questions, students with different test-taking strengths can find questions that make them feel at ease, which gives them more confidence to tackle the types of questions they find harder. They also have a couple of skill application tests per term, which gives them a real benchmark on how they are progressing in the program.
The criteria used is a combination of a battery of written test. multiple choice,True and False, Essay(recipe recall knowledge)and practical based assessments.
HI Anthonia- Welcome to ED 103! You are exactly correct - assessments have to be spread over the entire class on a regular basis. Best wishes for continued success in your teaching career! Susan
The instructor must make sure the students are understaning his/her instructions by administring different tests during different times of the course (Pre-test, Pop Quiz, midterm, post-test and final exam)
