If you have used one of our books you may remember our accounts of student multimedia “butterfly projects”.
Today, I encountered a description of the Univ. of Minnesota Monarchs In the Classroom web site. This is a great site for science teachers wanting to rear monarchs as classroom projects, follow the migration, etc.
Assessment has been a high profile topic. Here is a new perspective on the issue.
Just what skills should we be assessing? This is really the core question. The controversy is not whether or not we need to know what students know and can do, but whether the assessment techniques employed really evaluate important skills.
Instead of avoiding assessment or complaining about the narrow focus of the high stakes tests many students are required to take, why not expand the scope of what skills are evaluated.
For example – “The Information and Communications Technology literacy assessment, which will be introduced at about two dozen colleges and universities later this month, is intended to measure students’ ability to manage exercises like sorting e-mail messages or manipulating tables and charts, and to assess how well they organize and interpret information from many sources and in myriad forms.”
See complete report int he New York Times. (Note: You may have to register)