Reflective Assessment #2

The student’s role is to gather information, decipher it, filter it, determine relevancy, enabling the assessment to come full circle in relating information back to the professor.  The amount of assessments that a professor allows his/her students are proportionate to the assessments a student allows a professor.  It almost reminds me of a teeter-totter.  In order for an action to occur, a student or instructor has to first perform an action to stimulate a response/motion/progress.  That action is then reciprocated back through feedback.  A professor cannot successfully meet desired learning objectives if a feedback forum does not exist for the students.  Likewise for students – it is important students realize the power of their feedback and that they actively participate in self-assessments and metacognitive thinking in order to facilitate improved learning.  Students should use assessment as personal roadmaps to gauge their learning experience and decision making processes.  Students have everything to gain and nothing to lose from assessment!  Assessment facilitates self-evaluation that is crucial to any level of learning, which stimulates metacognitive approaches to improved expert learning and transfer.  Assessment also gives a student a voice, enabling motivation and confidence in the learning environment. 

Reflection on Building Formative Assessment Unit

Backward design seemed so straightforward as a sound, fundamental, common sense strategy when reading about.   However, today I was caught off guard and a bit alarmed when creating the unit on formative assessment.  Not once did I think of the Backward Design as an established framework that I could use for this activity.  Instead I incorporated it as primary literature or vocabulary that I believed to be crucial to the formative assessment concept.  It wasn’t until our discussion did I realize that I had completely overlooked Backward Design as a reliable framework to design a unit.  Not only did my overall understanding of Backward Design grow , but the usefulness/utility exposed itself in a perfect Ah-ha moment!  Designing courses/units shouldn’t be confusing or overwhelming, but exciting in the revealing sense of transparency, connections, and purposeful design!

Describing the most salient features of formative assessment to a science colleague would revolve primarily on a positive feedback loop between students and teachers characterized by its ongoing, dynamic, and progressive nature.  It is a learning that is always learning by continuous evaluation of a student’s progress toward a desired goal where new information is gathered and added to guide decisions for future teaching and learning. 

Interview Reflection

Chatting it up with Alberto provided great feedback on my interview questions.  Through the hypothetical interview in class, I realized how important and useful a scenario can be.  This can establish a great context and framework to kick start the interview and hopefully put the interviewee at ease.  I really tried to build progressive questions that could easily be regressed, if need be, to a more familiar topic if the student got nervous/anxious.  This was also my game plan for the “I don’t knows”.  The mock interview also revealed the power that these questions can have to expose a student’s struggles with connections and processes.  I was, however, not expecting the difficulty in biting my tongue when it came to explaining or discussing answers.  I definitely struggled with allowing an assessment to occur instead of quizzing the interviewee for the right answer. 
Little packages of information were mentioned in the class discussion as a useful tool and I whole heartedly agree.  The interview, after all, is a conversation with a purpose and these tidbits provide a helpful semi-formal structure, which may encourage the student to open up and reveal his/her thought processes.  Over the weekend I plan on revising my scenario and I would also like to fit in a drawing of a conceptual model in there somewhere as well. 

Interview Questions (First Draft)

Concept:  Combustion Process in a Prescribed Burn Setting

Scenario: You are a range manager in the Northern Great Plains in an area where there is extensive woody shrub encroachment and are interested in restoring native grass species.  What are some of the management options that could restore native prairie and minimize invasive shrub species? 

1. What does a manager need from the environment to mimic a historic wildfire event? 

2. Can you explain to me the processes that first absorb and then release energy during a fire?

3. Why would it be more difficult to burn live, green fuel?

4. How can grasses burn differently from trees?

5. Why might dormant or dead grass burn before a dead tree?

6. Can combustion occur rapidly or slowly? 

7. What is the relationship between combustion and pyrolysis?

8. Do you feel it is important to gauge the potential pyrolysis of plant material prior to ignition?

9. Would you expect grasses to enter into the smoldering phase of combustion before trees? 

10. Between grasses and trees, which would smolder longer? 

11. Could this generate more or less heat?

12. How long would a fire last in a grassland without any shrub encroachment? 

13. How would the combustion process in a coniferous forest differ from this scenario?