When developing a course outline or curriculum an instructor will determine his/her students needs and identify objectives that he/she feels the students need to accomplish in order to learn the content. In order for an instructor to determine whether or not an objective has been met they will need to develop an assessment or method to measure student learning. Assessments are an important part of a lesson. They help the instructor to determine if the objective has been met or not and what remediation, if any, needs to be done in order to help the student achieve the goal set for them.

Assessments are as varied as the people who design them and the curriculum that drives them. Since this is the case, the developer of the assessment has to remember the purpose behind the assessment. An assessment can be defined as " any method used to better understand the current knowledge that a student possesses". (1991 ) So what is any method? It can be as simple as observing students in the classroom working on a project or as complicated as a portfolio that has been put together by the student to showcase what he/she has learned. Therefore there are numerous criteria that an instructor must consider when developing an assessment method.

First of all the reason why the student(s) is (are) being assessed must be considered. The reasons why students are assessed are as varied as the methods developed to assess with. They may be assessed to group them into learning categories; to identify individual levels of mastery of a subject; to monitor student progress; to determine grades or feedback on projects or even to motivate students.

Once the reason for assessment is determined then the method of assessment must be decided upon. Certain methods lend themselves better to different end results. Traditional testing methods may be used to group students. Examples of traditional testing methods are tests that are created with true/false or multiple choice questions. A specific test example is the Stanford test that the state mandates our 2^nd, 4^th, 8^th and 11^th grade students to take, or the new DACS testing that is mandated for grades 3, 6 and 11 next year in the state of South Dakota.

Performance based assessments require the student to demonstrate what they have learned or what they can do with what they have learned. Examples of performance based assessments are open ended test questions, a situation or question that requires a student to perform a task correctly, a project or an experiment whereby the student has to apply what they have learned or an ongoing portfolio of examples of their work. In order to evaluate these types of assessments a rubric must be created.

Group C was comprised of Pam Halverson, Michelle Mehlberg and Gay Pickner. The group met weekly for three weeks using netmeeting in order to plan and implement our assessment system. Besides the weekly netmeetings, email was also used to communicate regarding the project. Out of these meetings and the content discussed, we chose to create our system around the students developing a PowerPoint presentation with an emphasis on writing and the actual PowerPoint. The complete activity can be found at http://www.teachers.k12.sd.us/mm018/newpage19.htm as well as the objectives for the project.

It was discussed among the group that it was important to measure whether or not the students had the basic skills to develop a PowerPoint presentation. For example does the student know the functions of the menu bar? For this reason, Group C determined that traditional assessment methods needed to be an important part of this assessment system in order to measure basic skills. One of the main reasons traditional testing was included was that the instructor has to be confident that the student knows the basic skills to develop a PowerPoint presentation. Right or wrong answers to true/false questions or multiple choice questions will tell the instructor if the student knows the basic skills. The data that is collected can be used to help the instructor determine if remediation needs to occur in order for the objective to be achieved by the student.

One of the negative issues regarding this type of assessment is the fact that it is hard to be totally sure that the student knows the information. The student could memorize the information, take the test and forget the information upon receiving a good grade. Also, there are some students who are simply good test takers for whatever reason. Whether they are good at eliminating the obvious wrong answer or good at guessing can be argued.

For this reason, group C also felt it important to include another assessment method to balance this out. Rubrics were the second assessment method chosen to include. Although the PowerPoint skills that the student has learned needs to be addressed, the group also determined that the writing done within the presentation also needed to be assessed. Rubrics were created to assess the writing within the lesson as well as to assess the PowerPoint presentation itself. To add a new discussion dimension, we researched assessing the actual portfolio itself as well as the products within he portfolio.

One of the benefits to assessing students in this manner is that students can showcase what they know at higher level of thinking than with traditional assessment forms. It is a less stressful method of testing also than traditional methods. The one major disadvantage to this type of assessment is that it is very time consuming for the teacher to grade.

This type of assessment is very subjective so we also researched bias and equity for performance based assessments.

Through our discussions, we decided that Pam would be responsible for Monday’s discussion on the WebBoard. Her focus was on rubrics as an assessment method. Through the comments posted, I believe that almost everyone feels that there is a place in their assessment systems for rubrics. The exception might possibly be the math people. The consensus was that rubrics allowed for specific criteria to be applied to each student’s work, thus setting guidelines. The students should see the rubric upfront before doing the project so that they know what criteria they need to include in their projects. One limitation discussed at one point in time in our discussions was the fact that some students will perform at the level expected (to the criteria spelled out in the rubric) where some students will do a little extra. Both are graded on the same criteria possibly receiving the same grade. Pam’s section of the assessment system can be found at http://www.students.dsu.edu/halversp/CET720/project2/index.htm.

Gay led the WebBoard discussion on Tuesday. She focused on traditional assessment methods targeting using true/false questions and multiple-choice questions. The math people seemed to be more comfortable with this assessment method. It is easy to see how some objectives in some curriculum areas are easier to assess this way. There are times when a right or wrong answer is needed and traditional assessments methods work best. One comment made was that with student numbers, one might choose this method of assessment as it takes less time to grade this in comparison to a rubric. Gay’s section of the assessment system is located at http://teachers.k12.sd.us/gp003/creating_a_powerpoint_presentati.htm.

I was responsible for performance based assessment portion of the system. We had looked at some aspects of performance based objectives in the past several weeks. The two most common types we spent a lot of time discussing were rubrics and portfolios. In my discussion, we focused on assessing the whole portfolio versus just the components within the portfolio. In addition to this we started to discuss bias and equity in evaluating performance based objectives and the WebBoad began experiencing problems. My section of the total assessment system is located at http://www.teachers.k12.sd.us/mm018. We had planned to wrap our presentation up on Thursday but were unable to do so due to a technology failure of the WebBoard.

Overall I felt the week went well except for the fact that we experienced technology related difficulties. I feel that the whole group started to look at performance based assessments in a new light. It was either Jan or Al that discussed the fact that what they thought they were doing was performance based objectives really wasn’t in terms of what we posted for our project. I feel that we had a successful discussion regarding traditional assessments, rubrics and performance based assessments.

A variety of assessments are important when measuring student learning. In working with a goal such as ours and dealing with hands on concepts one needs to include performance based assessments as well as traditional assessments. Traditional assessments will measure basic knowledge facts that the student needs to know in order to successfully create a PowerPoint presentation. The performance-based assessments will measure how successfully the student can apply that basic information in relation to a specific set of directions. If assessments are in place to measure the objects, the instructor will know if the student has gained the knowledge that is important to meet the objective. As curriculum changes and technology becomes more widely used teachers need to change the delivery method as well as the types and kinds of assessments used. If teachers are successful in doing this, they will have successful students.