As a Bio major at a small liberal arts school in Vermont, I had many classes with professors that did not have much of a background in Education. They had undergone very traditional educations and then spent time doing professional research. However, the department chair came up with the idea of doing once a month professional development with the professors in the field of Education, rather than Biology. I'm pretty sure it involved a lot of home-brewed beer and wine, but they picked up the idea of alternative assessments and took it to heart.
There is no one particular assessment that stands out above all the rest, but I can remember a few. I had an Aquatic Biology midterm the involved an overnight class field trip to the southern coast of Maine, where we set up research at low tide in the evening and then collected data at low tide the following morning.
A second memory involved a writing an essay for a Literature class while exploring the abandoned town of Upper Tahawus in the Adirondacks where Theodore Roosevelt was vacationing when President McKinley died. We then traced (by van) the route he took to the North Creek rail station in a milk wagon on his way to being sworn in as President.
I can remember quite a few other "performance based" assessments in the lab, but I think the two examples above are some of the most interesting to hear about. Creating cDNA libraries and analyzing them with a gene chip doesn't mean much to most people.
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Glen,
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you did some really cool things during your college years! The performance based assessment that I think would be the most beneficial (that you described) would be the over-night field trip. Did you know what you were being assessed on during the field trip? This assessment seems really powerful as long as your professors were very organized and used the data they collected to assess you properly. Great job on your post!
~Adrienne Loftus
Your experience is certainly unique. Since I was an education major with a history concentration, I did not have quite the same "field trips." I did do service learning hours and classroom observation hours. Of the literally hundreds of hours I ended up doing over the course of my undergraduate work, I do not really have an experience that is as powerful as yours. I took bits and pieces of things that I liked and then forgot the rest.
ReplyDeleteI think that performance-based assessments such as your field trip can be more beneficial depending on the content area or subject matter. The degree to which the student is involved is also contingent upon how well the teacher designs the assignment. With that said, I think your experience (accompanied with your high interest level particularly) was of high value, whereas, my numerous classroom visits and observations were hindered by me having to take silly notes on classroom set up and design and at times, case studies.
As far as the measurability of the assignment. I am sure you could of done the same experiment in a lab, but the real-world experience fostered connection as you learned the content. That is very cool.
You reminded me of the electrophoresis lab we did at a tech center in high school. It as setup as a DNA-finger printed from a crime scene. Of course, the DNA was actually some benign bacteria culture, but we go the same effect.
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