Student Assessment of their Learning Gains (SALG)

The Student Assessment of their Learning Gains (SALG) instrument was developed in 1997 by Elaine Seymour. The SALG instrument focuses exclusively on the degree to which a course has enabled student learning.
Information on the development of the SALG, and on validity and reliability evidence of the approach can be found in the following article:
 •Seymour, E., Wiese, D., Hunter, A. & Daffinrud, S.M. (Marzo del 2000). Creating a Better Mousetrap: On-line Student Assessment of their Learning Gains. Paper presentation at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, San Francisco, CA. Download article

Linda Suskie

A Faculty Focus pede quase 300 dólares por um  CD com o seminário de Linda Suskie sobre avaliação. O tema é sempre interessante (The Four Questions Every Assessment Report Should Answer), mas quem no seu juízo gasta esse dinheiro num CD se pode comprar o livro por 30?
Para quem nem isso quer gastar, é só procurar o material da autora que está disponível por aí. Deixo alguns apontadores.

• What is“Good”Assessment? Um resumo do livro.
  "The following approaches will help increase the accuracy and truthfulness of assessment strategies.
  Start with clear statements of the most important things you want students to learn from the course, program, or curriculum.
  Teach what you are assessing.
  Make assignments and test questions crystal clear.
  Before creating an assignment, write a rubric: a list of the key things you want students to learn by completing the assignment and to demonstrate on the completed assignment.
  Likewise, before writing test questions, create a test “blueprint”: a list of the key learning goals to be assessed by the test and the number of points or questions to be devoted to each learning goal.
  Make sure that your assignments and test questions clearly relate to your key learning goals.
  Ask colleagues and students to review drafts of your assignments, rubrics, and (using former students) test questions to make sure they’re clear and appear to assess what you want them to.
  Try out surveys and similar tools with a small group of students before using them on a larger scale.
  Collect enough evidence to get a representative sample of what your students have learned and can do.
  Score student work fairly and consistently.
  Use assessment results appropriately."
• Understanding and Using Assessment Results. Uma apresentação, da qual existem várias versões.
  
• Fair Assessment Practices: Giving Students Equitable Opportunties to Demonstrate Learning. Um artigo muito interessante:
  "Seven Steps to Fair Assessment
  1. Have clearly stated learning outcomes
  2. Match your assessment to what you teach and vice versa
  3. Use many different measures and many different kinds of measures
  4. Help students learn how to do the assessment task
  5. Engage and encourage your students
  6. Interpret assessment results appropriately
  7. Evaluate the outcomes of your assessments"
• E finalmente o site da autora.

E pronto, muito material de estudo e reflexão pelo preço módico de 3 euros. Não aceito Paypal ainda por causa do Assange, mas podem pagar em cheque ou em dinheiro. Não passo recibos, evidentemente.

Views: Why Are We Assessing? - Inside Higher Ed

Views: Why Are We Assessing? - Inside Higher Ed

The most important purpose of assessment should be not improvement or accountability but their common aim: everyone wants students to get the best possible education.

But even if we help faculty learn about research-informed pedagogies, do they have meaningful incentives to use them? Providing students with the best possible education often means changing what we do, and that means time and work. Much of the higher education community has no real incentive to change how we help students learn. And if there's little incentive to change or be innovative, there’s little reason to assess how well we're keeping our promises.

Our second common purpose of assessment should be making sure not only that students learn what’s important, but that their learning is of appropriate scope, depth, and rigor.

Our third common purpose of assessment is something we don't want to talk about, but it’s a reality that isn’t going away: it's how we spend our money. Actually, it's not our money. Every college and university is simply a steward of other people's money: tuition from our students and their families, funds from taxpayers, gifts from donors, grants from foundations. As stewards, we have an obligation to use our resources prudently, in ways that we are reasonably sure will be both successful and reasonably cost-effective. Here again, assessment is simply a vital tool to help us do this.

Now is the time to bring these three common purposes of assessment to the forefront. In order to tackle them, we need to work as a community, with greater and broader dialogue and collaboration than we see now. Now is the time to move our focus from the road we are traveling to our destination: a point at which we all are prudent, informed stewards of our resources… a point at which we each have clear, appropriate, justifiable, and externally-informed standards for student learning. Most importantly, now is the time to move our focus from assessment to learning, and to keeping our promises. Only then can we make higher education as great as it needs to be.

Lecture Capture: A New Way to Think about Hybrid Courses

Lecture Capture: A New Way to Think about Hybrid Courses

Estou a trabalhar nesta direcção já há algum tempo.

Avaliação de desempenho

Já se sabia que ia chegar, e aqui está ela: os professores universitários vão ser avaliados. Descontemos por um momento que as provas de APCC, as de doutoramento, e as da nomeação definitiva por que passei também foram momentos de avaliação. Esqueçamos o ter trabalhado 15 anos até atingir uma posição de (sei-o agora!) relativa estabilidade. Nunca tive medo de avaliações, e não é agora que vou passar a ter. Gosto delas justas, mas já passei por muitas que não o foram. Tenho até o palpite que estas também não vão ser, até porque estão a ser organizadas por professores universitários. Sim, os mesmos que fizeram a transição para Bolonha, lembram-se? Pois.

Vou ir deixando por aqui umas notas sobre o assunto, que é para isto que este blogue serve.

Li com atenção e respeito os dois artigos publicados por Paulo Ferreira da Cunha no último número da revista do SNESup, um dos quais está também publicado no site: Pensada Lei, Pensada Malícia - A propósito das avaliações universitárias em preparação:

Avaliar é muito importante, porque seria uma forma de introduzir mais justiça na Universidade. Mas só se for mesmo para introduzir justiça. E, como dizia Santo Agostinho, só é possível haver justiça com pessoas justas. Tememos que a nossa sociedade e a nossa Universidade, cada vez mais egoístas e competitivas, cada vez mais amorais, não tenham ainda aprendido o necessário distanciamento e imparcialidade.

O outro artigo é mais concreto, mas igualmente au point. Vou ver se o encontro por aí.

O pronto-a-vestir universitário

As developing countries build their higher education sectors, many see the "US-style university" as the desired model. This typically means an institution that combines teaching at most or all postsecondary levels with a broad, internationally recognised research programme, all in a campus-like setting. Faculty are expected both to teach and to carry out research in areas that are globally recognised as important. But is this really an appropriate model?
[...]
Many countries considering this model do not have the base of the pyramid in place. Without it, the elite university cannot effectively play the role that its proponents assume. And last but not least, this is the most expensive model of higher education ever invented. Combining research and teaching may have benefits, but it also has high costs. Research faculty command relatively high salaries compared with teaching faculty, and they teach relatively few students. Research facilities are expensive to build and maintain. Even the US is finding that it can no longer afford this model.
[...]
developing countries should concentrate on building institutions of quality that respond to the issues, challenges and opportunities of their own situations. They should investigate radically different approaches that lower the cost of higher education while achieving appropriate educational goals.
This independent path is the best way to serve their citizens and their futures. In time, the best of these institutions will come to define "world class" in 21st-century terms, just as happened in the US in the 20th century.

Sérgio Godinho, "Não te deixes assim vestir"

(a partir do minuto 6)

Uma (boa) pergunta

"I have a question and it goes like this. Just suppose we are in a period in which the future of human life on the planet is seriously threatened – by climate change and all the negative economic, social and cultural processes that attend it – then are the world’s universities really doing all they could to mitigate and even head off the risks? So far as I’m concerned, it’s a rhetorical question. The answer is – not really. Good, maybe, but not good enough."

Ler o resto

Nigel Thrift

Um vídeo inspirador de um poeta/professor inspirador

Veja outros vídeos de Taylor Mali. AVISO: prepare-se para ficar agarrado ao écran.

Theory and Practice of Online Learning

"Distance educators, students, administrators, and parents are daily forced to make choices regarding the pedagogical, economic, systemic, and political characteristics of the distance education systems within which they participate. To provide information, knowledge, and, we hope, a measure of wisdom, the authors of this text have shared their expertise, their vision, their concerns, and their solutions to distance education practice in these disruptive times. Each chapter is written as a jumping-off point for further reflection, for discussion, and, most importantly, for action. Never in the history of life on our planet has the need for informed and wisdom-filled action been greater than it is today. We are convinced that education—in its many forms—is the most hopeful antidote to the errors of greed, of ignorance, and of life-threatening aggression that menace our civilization and our planet.
(...)
This book is written by authors from a single university—Athabasca University—which has branded itself “Canada’s Open University.” As an open university, we are pleased to be the first such institution to provide a text such as this one as an open and free gift to others."

Uma outra visão do processo de Bolonha

"While it is easy to claim that certain reforms are technically in place and to provide supporting evidence for this, listening to the student voice can reveal that these reforms are only in place at a rather superficial level, and that the situation on the ground is far less glossy than the paper on which such statements are made."

Um relatório arrasador, que vale a pena ler para confirmar que afinal não é apenas impressão nossa:

Bologna with student eyes. European Students' Union, 2009.