Assessing Student Learning | Origin: EL115
This is a general discussion forum for the following learning topic:
Gaming and Simulation in Online Learning --> Assessing Student Learning
Post what you've learned about this topic and how you intend to apply it. Feel free to post questions and comments too.
The idea that gaming can serve as a means of relieving test anxiety definitely makes it worthwhile for consideration. The additiaonal idea that a pre-test and post-test method of assessment could help better understand the impact of the gaming or simulation on learning.
Formative assessments lend themselves to gaming activities since they offer playing them multiple times without stress.
Well developed games and simulations can be used as a communication tool.
While the game is important for engagement of the learners and to help them retain information/make new memories. It is also a potential assessment tool.
Not all games are useful and that is why there are tools to analyze their effectiveness.
In this module, I have learned that Evidence-centered design supports assessment by combining competency, evidence and task models. This framework identifies the attributes being assessed and behaviors that represent such attributes, and it identifies the activities that connect what is being assessed to what players do within the game.
The use of games as a mean of assessment is intriguing, as long as it is not too complicated to use.
Assessments have always proven problematic in education. How do we prove to a larger audience that our students know something? How do we show hard evidence of something that is at times abstract and anecdotal? Rubrics, reflections, analysis, and pre-post tests, it is all very similar, just put in a new format.
I believe pre and post assessment are critical in evaluating the level of learning achieved.
Online learning expereinces can be adapted to online learning to accomodated their learning. Assessing learning is becoming increasingly easier as more programers are able to to it and educators are requiring it for learning opportunities. Separation between the individual learner and the group leaning process is getting easier to do with certain programs which provides more quantiative and qualitiative assessment models for educators.
Formative Assessments monitor students learning and provides ongoing feedback to the staff and the students, while, Summative Assessments evaluate the students learning at the end of a course by comparing it against some standard or benchmark.
I was suprised to learn that games and simulations can be a great communication tool.
Incorporate evidence centered design for assessment.
Skills evaluation is a growing area of game design. In my courses, I would look to use games to reinforce concepts and test their absorption in other ways.
One main challenge for educators who want to employ or design games to support learning involves making valid inferences—about what the learner knows, believes and can do—at any point in time, at various levels and without disrupting the flow of the game.
I have to go with what Terrence Stone said about the pre and post-test assessment of the efficacy of gamification in the course. I have been involved in online education since 1999 and as technology advanced always believed gamification was a great way to make the learning experience unique and engaging. The days of reading static PDFs and answering discussion questions are behind us and are obsolete in my opinion. My dissertation utilized a pre and post-test design to measure the effect of a learning intervention and I believe it would work well in this application as well. The stealth assessment is also beneficial to obtain quality data on how the game is influencing the learning environment. If course, we need to be careful about how this data is utilized and it may require going through the school’s IRB if it is to be used for publication and research.
I have learned so much abut the research that supports adding games and simulations to the course to help stduents.
Also, I am curious to see how the intercative assessments advance in the coming years - as well as the
physical measures (ie EEG, GSR, and EMG feedback) - technology is amazing and it will be nice to use it more and more to engage learners
The pre-and post test model is a system that my students are familiar with. I plan to utilize this model along with simulations to better assess they are learning off the content.
I've learned that I can use games or gaming to assess student knowledge.
