Alternative assessment

I read Enhancing Learning by Engaging Students by Rick Finnan and Donna Shaw at http://oregonstate.edu/dept/eli/osu-hedp/large_classes_engaging_students.html. The problems of large classes mentioned in the article represent the problems of most of the large classes. As I have already mentioned in the second week, I have to teach more than 100 students in a class. One of the major problems in my class is: there is no teacher-student and student-student interaction. Moreover, there is no frequent testing and feedback on students’ performance. I agree with what Finnan and Shaw argue “students feel little sense of responsibility or accountability in class, and students do not retain the content of the lecture.”

At the same time, we can use a large class as significant source for teaching if it is handled properly. The foremost thing is to think about how to make the classroom more interactive so that students learn more effectively without losing their attention.

A major issue here is: how to create such an environment in which students collaborate to each other to perform a task and learn. There are different technological tools to promote collaboration among the students. We can provide them technology-integrated projects in group as we discussed in the last week.

Think-Pair-Share can be enabled by showing some videos related to the lesson. For example, I can download photos from http://www.molon.de/galleries/Nepal/. By showing some pictures, I introduce the lesson for 10 minutes. And then, I show some more pictures and ask students to work in pair (person sitting next to them) and compose a six-line poem about the pictures. Later, they will read out the poems for the whole class. This process will make students interact to each other. This will also develop their creative writing ability. By taking responses of other students, I evaluate each group’s work.

Use of Minute Paper in the Power Point is another important technique. I can use it to make my class effective. Before I begin the lesson, I can ask students a couple of questions related to the previous lesson. In this regard, they will be asked to maintain the reflective blogs as we are doing now. Students make use of their reflective blogs to answer the questions.

Moreover, we can also use a Minute Paper in order to assess what students learned in today’s class. Students write two important things they learned in today’s class in a card or a sheet of paper and share in class. This can also be done as a group or pair work.

Scripted Cooperative Learning is another useful technique that can be used to engage students in large classes. In this technique, students are divided into groups. And one student summarises the content of the lesson and another student evaluates the summariser’s note. This develops cooperation and collaboration among them. This also develops their ability to judge/evaluate each others’ written work.

This is what I think about the useful techniques in my context. What do you think about this?

Best regards
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