Hi, Chuck -
I’m going to copy/paste 2 comments from your comments to Nate’s post and stick them in my blog b/c they’re important to me, and I don’t want to lose them later.
you wrote:
“As to what questions to ask, I am fascinated by your remark a few posts ago about the inappropriateness of final exams for most courses.”
This is an area of major concern for me, too. As you know, my university braille course culminates with an on campus (or proctored) final proficiency exam. I’ve been flexible, and negotiable on all aspects of my course, but not on this issue. BECAUSE I cannot determine for sure that a student is actually doing his/her own work online, I have held fast to my practice of a SUPERVISED proficiency test. The code is the code… either you know it or you don’t. Whatever you do during the trimester builds up to this demonstration of “yes I can, and here it is.” I have not yet figured out how to assess this in any other manner, so I would appreciate everyone’s thoughts and ideas.
You wrote:
“I am curious as to how best to address the need for authentic assessment in the online environment?”
The projects assigned to the students are (IMHO) authentic assessment via online environments. They learn how to speak intelligently (to a parent, administrator, colleague) about promising practices in literacy, they create braille-print books, they transcribe children’s short stories. They collect business cards of people who are involved in all aspects of braille literacy, tactile graphics, etc. to build their personal network of where to go and who to ask when they realize they don’t know all the answers. All of these are “real-life” activities; things they would do as teachers.
But… this final proficiency determination… it has many of us concerned. For that reason, the university teachers of braille will be meeting at Getting in Touch with Literacy to discuss these very issues… online braille instruction. I do believe it’s scheduled for Sunday morning…
This is a conversation we wouldn’t have had 5 years ago…
5 responses so far ↓
1
Nate
// Oct 6, 2005 at 2:04 pm
This is one of the exceptions to my No Final Exams rule. There are a number of instances where skill training needs to culminate in a demonstration of that skill. Braille, boxing, surgery, and pilot training are a few I can think of.
When we deal with “knowledge” or “attitude” based domains — or when we mix courses to include all three components — then the utility of a “performance based” final is more limited because the answers are less well defined.
2
sheila
// Oct 6, 2005 at 2:11 pm
Well… we could use a webcam to observe participants taking a final exam online with Perky Duck … it would probably take some creative maneuvering to have the head of one person appear simultaneously with the hands of another.
(only kidding… my morning attempt to think out of the box after watching the Yankees until after 1 AM).
3
Charles Farnsworth
// Oct 8, 2005 at 10:08 pm
I am fascinated by your putting boxing, pilot training and surgery into the same category as braille instruction. While practicing as an teacher of students who are visually impaired I was fascinated and exhilarated by the variations in eye conditions encountered among my student caseloads. I got straight A’s in my on-line functional vision graduate course examinations and enjoyed it immensely but found in the field that I needed to be able to use bits and pieces of this information and often acquire more data over a period of observation and collaboration with other professionals to formulate solutions to problems faced by my students in their use of residual vision. The latter process was pretty much self-taught and I don’t know what final exam could have prepared me for it.
4
Charles Farnsworth
// Oct 8, 2005 at 10:13 pm
Hi Sheila,
I concur with you completely in the need for a final exam for demonstration of braille proficiency as it would be very easy for a student to use Duxbury translation software and an embosser to produce and then submit braille assignments that would probably look no different than hard-copies generated manually on a braillewriter.
5
Administrator
// Oct 9, 2005 at 12:07 am
My antenna go up whenever I receive homework assignments done on tractor-feed paper. Then I start looking for things like hyphenations over-and-above what I am expecting them to do, or wraparounds of entire words.
I sometimes get “perfect braille” where I would expect even an experienced braillist to make an error…
If that happens, I usually put a message up on the announcement board… something to the effect of, “your final exam is coming… I look forward to seeing the same quality of transcriptions on your final that I have seen all trimester.”
This year, for the first time, my students must pass the final exam to pass the course. In the past, they could have squeaked through by accumulating enough points for all of the other activities. Now, they will receive an Incomplete if they do not pass the final, and will have to take a comparable one within a month.
Raising the bar…
no easy solutions here…