Alternative Assessment

Members
Faculty Chair:: Liz Warren, SMCC
District Support:: Mike Rooney

Charge

The Alternative Assessment group is charged with researching, investigating, and identifying new ways of assessing student learning, such as portfolios in the classroom. The group will also investigate formative learning assessment.

Discussion Highlights

We first convened our group at the Ocotillo organizational meeting in September where we scheduled ourselves to meet six times.

Given that alternative assessment is a very large area and that the members of the committee had different interests and levels of sophistication, we decided to organize ourselves around the questions about assessment that group members wanted answered for themselves during the course of the year. We saw our committee as an opportunity for each of us to learn what we really wanted or needed to know about assessment.

At our next meeting, we came up with four broad areas of inquiry, each of which was the special interest of one or two members of the committee, and which they intended to learn more about. The areas and associated questions were:

Grading Systems

How is alternative assessment translated to existing grading systems?
What is the relationship between alternative assessment and pre- and post-testing and transcripts?
How do we make a transition to a non-graded structure?

TQL and Alternative Assessment

What is the connection between TQL and alternative assessment?
Is there a more effective use of TQL tools in assessment?

Portfolios

What is the applicability of portfolios?
Is portfolio assessment inconsistent with standardized/placement testing?
Can portfolios be used in GED, ABE, ESL?
Can a portfolio checklist be used to help instructors?

Assessment Criteria

What are the criteria for alternative assessment?
What alternative assessment techniques match the various teaching and learning goals?

Since we knew that each of us would be coming across information that would be relevant to others, we decided to create a resource manual. A resource manual or guide would provide a way for us to organize our inquiry and eventually become the product of our Ocotillo work. We agreed to use a matrix so that everyone was collecting similar kinds of information. The elements of the matrix include:

name of the assessment technique
brief description
when the technique is most appropriately used, for example at the assignment, class, program, or degree level
references for the technique
advantages and disadvantages
implementation strategies

We ultimately decided to put the information on the server, so that we could all access it, and so that it would be available to the committee next year. For information on accessing the server, contact Faculty Chair Liz Warren.

What next?

The majority of the members of the committee have stated that they feel themselves drawn to other projects and do not plan to continue on the committee. The members who are interested in continuing hope to recruit new members for next year so that the committee can continue further dialogues on assessment.

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