MarkBook® Appendix A - 3
Category Models for Organizing Assessment Data MarkBook® Appendix A - 3
Category Models for Organizing Assessment Data Assessment
data must be organized in a manner that reflects the achievement expectations of
the school system. This organization must also deliver the summary items
expected at the end of each teaching cycle. Additionally, good organization will
promote learnings other than cognitive knowledge e.g. cognitive skills and
affective learning.
Categories, sometimes called strands, provide an excellent means of
demonstrating compliance with curriculum or syllabus objectives. Some systems mandate
particular categories, while others leave category construction to the teachers.
Whether mandated or not, categories provide a means of controlling the
mathematical contribution of different items towards the final grade. They also
force the educator to employ a more robust and fair A&E process. Some
models follow with a discussion of pros and cons.
1. Categories as assessment types. This structure is commonly used. It forces the user to assess in a variety
of ways. The following example from
MarkBook's weight screen is described in more detail in section 7-6.
This teacher has classified the assessment data by type: assignments,
audio-visual notes, an exam,
homework, an Independent Study Unit, labs, quick tests, unit tests, etc. Each type of
assessment is given a weight or value towards the overall grade in the Target
column. For instance, the highlighted Exam counts for 30.0% of the final grade.
This classification system meets one of the "motherhood" assessment
principles described in Appendix A-1:
"assessment instruments should be highly varied in type". However, it doesn't force the user to assess using higher-order
objectives as in some of the category systems following. Nor does it guarantee
that assessment will be continuous - it's possible that a huge fraction of the assessments
were done during a brief interval.
Here is a variation. This English course is
broken down into Language, Literature, Media and Writing strands with
appropriate weightings.
To do peer assessment in this model, add another
category with low weight. MarkBook permits
up to thirty categories or strands per Mark Set. See section 4-3 for more
details on Mark Sets.
2. Categories as curriculum units. This example is from MarkBook's New Mark Set screen as described in section 1-3 and section 2-2. The assessments for this biology course are classified into the curriculum's five units. The percentage weighting of these units has been assigned according to the amount of time spent on each. The fifth unit on animal systems is the lengthiest whereas the first one on cells is the shortest.
This category system meets another of
the "motherhood" principles from Appendix A-1:
"assessment should be continuous".
With categories set up this way, each student will earn grades at a steady pace throughout this course. This
is appropriate for a course with a wide range of knowledge objectives. It's less
appropriate for a course that's predominantly skills such as mathematics.
Note that this teacher has edited the Block
Title to "Strand". Each assessment will be
cross-classified into a strand as it's entered into MarkBook. In effect, the teacher is
classifying each assessment
entry into a unit and a strand. MarkBook enables an analysis by one or both
of these classifiers, but the five unit classification categories shown here control the mathematical
contribution towards the overall grade. See
section 9-1.
3. Categories based on a
taxonomy of objectives. This
example uses Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives as its foundation for
category construction. This taxonomy breaks down all learning objectives into
four major groups, Cognitive Knowledge (facts, concepts, systems, etc.),
Cognitive Skills (intellectual abilities such as cross-classification, seriation,
mathematical skills, etc.), Affective Learnings (feelings, beliefs, value
systems, etc.), and Psychomotor Skills (mechanical abilities such as those
learned in technical studies, sports, keyboarding, penmanship, manipulating instruments, etc.).
This category classification
scheme ensures that more than just Cognitive Knowledge will be taught. It deals
with the "motherhood" principle in Appendix A-1: "assessments should cover a full range of instructional objectives including knowledge, skills, and affective items".
Since
this course is broken up into four equal time blocks, this teacher is using the
Block Title "Quartr" (6 characters allowed for the name) to cross-classify the data. Analysis by quarter
is thus enabled as in section 9-1.
4. Categories for
societal needs. This example
uses a political taxonomy based partly on learning objectives and partly on societal
expectations of graduates once they're beyond the educational system. Somewhat
like the previous example, it has a Knowledge & Understanding
category (Know&Und) and a Thinking & Inquiry category (ThinkInq).
Additionally, this model incorporates separate categories to deal with issues of employability skills.
There is a special category assigned to Communication (Comm'n) and another
to real-world Applications for the knowledge and skills taught (Appl'ns).
This taxonomy, imposed on all courses, addresses employability. With use, it's hoped that
graduates will tie theoretical learnings more closely with employment
applications and have superior communication skills.
The
relative weights of these categories must vary from subject to subject.
Technical courses (auto mechanics, woodworking), Phys Ed courses, keyboarding
courses, etc. should heavily weight the Application category. Conversely, a
course in Pure Math (a branch of mathematics which has no known real-world
applications) shouldn't have an Application category at all!
It's possible to cross-classify categories in MarkBook. Use the Block Title
system described above or use Mark Sets as
described in section 4-3 for this purpose.
Each Mark Set could become a category as per any of the models above. Then,
within each Mark Set, the user could employ a completely different category
scheme.