Student assessment

Student assessment is a good thing however it must be clearly defined. Meaning when professor is evaluating a student for a potential grade it needs to be clearly explained either before it is done or in the syllabus not after the grade is give. Often times the assessment is vague and not clear. When probe by the student sometime the faculty member maybe become agitated by the student for the question and say refer to the syllabus.  There is a reason why the student is asking the question because it was not clearly explained in the syllabus.

The role of the assessment is to clearly explain what the student is to gain from the assignment and how the student will be evaluated. The assessment will help the student by providing feedback in how to improve/learn/grow for the next assignment.  If the assessment is provided back before the next assignment is turned in it allows growth for the student to improve how the homework/writing etc. should be completed. 

Formative assessment

Formative assessment is complex and has many variables. Through this activity, it helped to broaden my awareness of how much time it really takes to fully comprehend what formative assessment really entails. Formative assessment has many parts. For me, when I would describe to a colleague what the most salient features of formative assessment would be is to support student learning. In order to support learning, this would require many steps. There would have to be teacher/student interaction which would require various activities such as pre questions to identify preconceptions and then post questions to reflect on what the student has learned.  

Reflections on Interview

        Based on the suggestions posted on my blog, I had altered my interview questions to include a set of four scenarios. By including the scenarios, it allowed me as the interviewer to identify the student’s conceptual understanding instead of the student reciting facts. The mock interview I had with Tara was helpful to fully understand how the interview questions would work. 

Both Tara and I had no knowledge about each other’s subject which gave us as the interviewers a unique opportunity to fine tune our questions.  I found that by having the four scenarios within my interview questions proved helpful and it was useful to have North Dakota geography as the background. This gave Tara something that she could relate to and identify with, which allowed the interview to go smoother. I also found that during the interview giving common examples e.g. a straight road vs. a curvy road allowed for Tara to relate a difference in landscape. For me, the preparation of examples could have made the interview a little smoother so from next time I will have some common examples already prepared.  For the interview, I will keep the 4 scenarios and have examples prepared in case the student needs something to relate to. Even though we had no knowledge in the subject, our interviews overall went very successful. 

Student Interview questions

My overall plan is to interview a junior or senior student who is majoring in Soil Science.  I would like to see the students understanding of how soil forms.

1. How is soil formed? Give me a general description. Think about how soil develop and what is needed for it to form

2. Do soil forming factors come into play?  

3. How many soil forming factors are there?

4. Are there five of them?

5. Can you list them? (Let’s write them down. Put on white board). 

6. Can you describe what each process does?  

7. Is each one of the soil forming processes important or are some of them non-relevant? Explain.

8. Can you have one soil forming factor without the other or are they interconnected?

9. How is soil influenced from these 5 soil forming factors?