Mellons Bay Staff ICT Reading Blog: "Assessing Key Competencies"

Saturday, May 24, 2008

"Assessing Key Competencies"

The team believes that the ideas of assessing key competencies are good but has concerns of the subjectiveness of them. The team is also concerned about the teachers' workload in addition to assessment of other key curricular areas. We all agree that the reading is interesting but some of us think that the research still sounds to serve merely as a research.

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Reading Summaries by Hayley

EnGauge 21st Century Skills: Literacy in the
Digital Age

This article shares a common perspective; the world in which our students will live in will be extremely different from today. It goes onto expand that our students are expected to actively participate in and through the internet and in doing so are establishing their own social norms. Further, it challenges us as educators with, ‘How do we, as adults, with the least experience in this milieu, provide leadership?’

It is suggests that schools need to define 21st century skills and recognise the need for multiple and varied assessments to measure these. The EnGauge 21st Century Skills are an attempt to address this need and support our students so they can effectively contribute to their future world.

In this article, the authors discuss that the digital divide is becoming less about access and more about identifying and providing skills for students. Skills which can equip them to live in a world where technology is bringing rapid social and information change.

Finally it discusses, that the digital age is driving change in the classroom; not only in what we should teach and learn [content] but also in the way we teach and learn [practise]. Our teaching practise is being aided by technology, it provides useful information on student learning and gives learners more relevant, meaningful and personalised learning opportunities.

ePortfolios
George Siemens
A definition: ePortfolios are digital resources which contain personal learning and teacher feedback. They demonstrate progress and creative expression to permitted invested parties. They are being seen as a valuable tool for learners.

An ePortfolios needs to be flexible, organized, displayed on the web, in the control of the learner and retrievable.

In order to introduce ePortfolios schools would need to begin to create a culture where students are encouraged to practise blogging, develop simple websites and store work online.

Self-Assessment through Rubrics
Heidi Andrade

Self-assessment is formative. It asks students to look at their work in progress by using a clear criteria, before requiring the learner to generate ways to improve their performance.

Rubrics supports student’s learning by giving them key elements to focus on in the form of a progressive criteria. The rubric aids the identification of student’s strengths and weaknesses and increases learning motivation.

Creating rubics with students can involve:
Setting clear expectations; this might be achieved by giving students a model of work and using it to generate shared vocabulary and a list of criteria that students analyse into a progression of performance.
Encouraging them to monitor their own progress by comparing their performances to the rubric criteria
Supporting them to revise by using their feedback from their self-assessment as a guide.

Assessing Key Competencies:
Dr Rosemary Hipkins

Hipkins that students need to be involved in the process of making judgements about their learning if they are to be active lifelong learners.

Hipkins suggests that we need to look at assessment through a different lens:
Performance needs to be judged in meaningful and engaging contexts over a period of time, where the purpose is clear and the feedback focused on supporting the learner to develop their personal competencies. The judgement should be made by more than one person and include the learner themselves.

Hipkins believes we know that our students will be living in a global connected world which will mean they will have:
· Greater exposure to cultures
· Ready electronic access
· Communication methods unrestricted by time and place or the need to be physically present.

What is new with the introduction of key competencies is the meta-level knowing or knowing about knowing.

Key competencies refocus outcomes
Creating and critiquing knowledge, not just ‘having’ it
Making links and connections to the whole learning context
Meta-level learning – learning about how we learn

Hipkins critiques the limitations of rubrics stating that rubrics:
Judge levels of performance at one moment in time on one source of evidence.
Apply to either knowledge or skill but not both or take into account student attitudes
Assess one aspect of a task and can not manage the whole context/content.
The learner is not necessarily involved in the judgement

Mellons Bay Staff ICT Reading Blog

Saturday, May 24, 2008

"Assessing Key Competencies"

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