assessment as proof of learning or as learning itself?

26 April 2024 - kudos:

Recently, an idea has been bubbling in my head that’s the culmination of months—even years—of thinking about how I assess in my courses. I’ve typically taken the pretty-standard approach that assessment is the process of students’ proving that they’ve learned something. What if, though, assessment is itself the proof of the process of students’ learning something. That is, what if we doled out points for students’ proving that they appropriately participated in learning activities and then trusted the learning to happen on its own?

on Scrabble, French, and what it means to learn

19 January 2024 - kudos:

In the summer of 2015, New Zealander Nigel Richards won the French-language world Scrabble championships despite not speaking a word of French. I heard this story on a Radio Télévision Suisse news show repackaged as a podcast (probably Le 12h30, but I can’t remember exactly) and wrote myself a note that if I ever got a chance to teach a class on games and learning, I would use this story in it.

assessment statements in my Spring 2024 graduate syllabus

6 January 2024 - kudos:

I ended the Fall 2023 semester with a lot of anxiety and frustration about grades, and there was enough of both that I wound up making a lot of changes to a graduate class that I was sure I was going to keep mostly the same from last year. Not all of these changes were assessment-related (I replaced a lot of readings and shuffled content around some), but I also more-or-less threw out the assessment structure that I’ve been using since 2019 to replace it with something minimalist and closely tied to the course’s learning objectives.

22 June 2023 - kudos:

Just had a long conversation with a student that reminded me that we cannot (and should not try to) assess that which we do not effectively teach.

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'ChatGPT Is So Bad at Essays That Professors Can Spot It Instantly'

2 March 2023 - kudos:

Lots of helpful stuff in here. link to ‘ChatGPT Is So Bad at Essays That Professors Can Spot It Instantly’

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'OpenAI Wants To Help You Figure Out If Text Was Written By OpenAI; But What Happens When It’s Wrong? | Techdirt'

2 February 2023 - kudos:

Just because some worries about ChatGPT are, indeed, moral panics doesn’t mean that there aren’t legtimate criticisms of the technology—including from an educational perspective. I happen to agree with Masnick that schools ultimately need to roll with the punches here, but given how much we already expect of our schools and teachers, it’s reasonable to resent being punched in the first place. Masnick’s point about the error rate for detecting AI-generated text is an important one, though: I don’t think plagiarism-detecting surveillance is at all the right response.

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'ChatGPT Is Passing the Tests Required for Medical Licenses and Business Degrees'

23 January 2023 - kudos:

Headline overstates things a bit, and I’m on team “change the assessments,” but it’s still worth asking if AI developers are appropriately anticipating the disruptions these tools are causing. link to ‘ChatGPT Is Passing the Tests Required for Medical Licenses and Business Degrees’

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'New York City schools ban access to ChatGPT over fears of cheating and misinformation - The Verge'

5 January 2023 - kudos:

Personally, I’m not very optimistic about ChatGPT, and I think OpenAI should have better considered disruptions to fields like education before releasing the tool. That said, I don’t think a ban is the solution here. link to ‘New York City schools ban access to ChatGPT over fears of cheating and misinformation - The Verge’

5 November 2022 - kudos:

I feel like I am constantly fine-tuning how I do assessments in my classes. I want to trust students and avoid policing them, but I’m frustrated when they respond to this approach by acting like it exempts them from attending class and participating.

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Students Are Using AI to Write Their Papers, Because Of Course They Are'

14 October 2022 - kudos:

Really important story here, and glad to see George Veletsianos quoted. I’ve long been an advocate for developing assessments that are impossible to cheat at, but I don’t know if that’s the entire (or even a practical) response to GPT-3. We are continuing to develop technologies whose societal effects we are not prepares for. link to ‘Students Are Using AI to Write Their Papers, Because Of Course They Are’

ClassDojo and educational 'accomplishment'

2 October 2022 - kudos:

As kiddo’s school year has gotten into full swing and mine has gotten busier, I’ve spent less time griping about her school’s use of ClassDojo. However, I’ve also become increasingly annoyed at the fact that the weekly update email I get from the company always has the subject line “What did your child accomplish this week?” The body of the email is divided into two sections: The number of “points” that my child was assigned, and the number of “stories” that my child appeared in.

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never Met - The New York Times'

27 May 2022 - kudos:

Why can’t we just learn to assess differently? There’s so much about proctoring software that ought to be worrying us. link to ‘Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never Met - The New York Times’

23 September 2020 - kudos:

Having my students post a weekly report on what they did that relates to each course objective. When it works, it’s the best kind of assessment—it assumes that there’s learning always happening and that we just need to notice it.