Minerva and Formative Assessment

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Using Minerva for Formative Assessment

Introduction

If you've fielded the barrage of questions put up by many young children when they first put speech, and the need to learn about the world, on the same table, you'll have met with formative assessment in the raw. A definition of 'Formative assessment' or 'Assessment for learning' might be:

"Encompassing all those activities undertaken by teachers, and/or by their students, which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged" (Black & Wiliam, 1999)

Formative Assessment vs Summative Assessment

Here's examples of alternating formative and summative approaches, have a guess which is which.

Asking questions and imposing strict time limits  ...   Asking questions, but generous time allowances for the response  ...   Questions that test students knowledge  ...   Questions that explore their understanding  ...   'What?' questions  ...   'Why?' questions  ...   Assessment by formal exam  ...   Peer or self assessment  ...   Work that's marked by the tutor  ...   Marked work with no marks, but feedback and comments

Minerva and Formative Assessment

Our VLE can help with this approach from the moment we set out to use it. Consider it this way: you meet with any one student for very few hours in the working week, and when you do, they may share their time with you with many others. Minerva allows you to provide resources for each individual, for them to use at a time that suits them. This in itself promotes the opportunity for reflective practice, assessment for learning, that benefits everyone.

You can also develop your use of the various tools within Minerva in a way that promotes formative assessment activities with your students.

Adding content

If you need to add content to Minerva while structuring it and making it easy to explore, consider using learning units - they're simple to set up, here's an explanation of learning units and how to go about using them.

Tests

Minerva's tests aren't intended for summative assessment - you'll not be likely to know which student is taking a test set by you unless they're in the room with you.

Instead, make use of tests to help people to think. When you use a test, ask few questions, but put some thought into both questions and feedback to encourage students to think critically whether their initial response is correct or otherwise. When using tests for formative assessment, the score is unimportant - the emphasis needs to be on the question, the reasoning, the feedback.

Make use of groups

Using Minerva, you can create small groups and allocate students to those. You can then make resources available to the groups you've created - including a group discussion board (see below).

Discussion boards

You can set up a discussion board for an entire module, or split students into smaller groups and make a private discussion board available to smaller numbers. Good use of discussion boards can need your encouragement though - and various choices are available to you, such as whether or not to allow anonymous posting, that will influence the use everyone will make of this space to promote the exploration and questioning of ideas and beliefs with members of a peer group.

Wikis

Minerva makes a Wiki tool available. Here's a little about Wikis including a brief pointer to how to get going with Minerva's 'Wiki' tool. Again, Wikis are a recent invention based in interactivity and reflective thinking about knowledge and experience. An advantage of using the Minerva-based Wiki (which works reasonably well) is that it has assessment tools built in to it - do investigate, using the module control panel's 'Assess wikis' link.

Blogs

Minerva has a blogging tool which double up as a reflective journal, here's more general info on blogs, including a section on Minerva's blogging tool.

Turnitin Grademarking tool

When you deploy a 'Turnitin assignment' you'll also find an onscreen marking tool available to you. This may have disadvantages depending on your marking style (for starters you may prefer to mark printed copies). It also offers you advantages - you can easily contribute feedback and comments, and even use simple shortcuts to indicate corrections to commonplace errors (such as spelling and grammar) with helpful web links to more advice and information.

The grademarking tool is straightforward to use, but you will need to train yourself using the training materials that arrive along with the tool itself. Use these to learn the capabilities of the tool.

Once you've marked a piece of work using the grademark tool, its simple for the student to return to the marked work and infuse your comments and feedback - they'll need to return to the link they used to submit the work, that will take them to the assignment's page and they can use a link there resembling a small red apple to open the marked essay in a new window and read both it and their tutors' comments and feedback.

Here's more on the Grademarking tool from their own site

However, a bit of a 'But' - though you can mark work using the Turnitin Gradebook, your students cannot at present see the feedback, owing to a bustage between Minerva and Turnitin, when this is sorted an announcement will come round.

Conclusion

Formative assessment's not an easy option - in some ways its simple to attach a mark to a piece of work. Try returning a piece of work to a student with no mark attached, but comments and feedback instead, and the most surprising reactions occasionally follow.

Regarding the VLE, there can be a time penalty in engaging with Minerva and formative assessment - while you'll already be using elements of this approach in your teaching, you may be learning new ways of working with Minerva, especially at first. Remember that you can contact the IT training team for help and advice though - at least regarding the IT aspects of all this - and that we can also run training workshops for individuals or groups of staff.

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