Blog Post 5: This American Life (of Formative Assessment) (Reflections and Readings)

Class Reflections 

“I think a big part of the Flint water crisis was more about emotion than about data” (something Kristin said)

In class, we listened along to a This American Life piece about a citizen striving to research and investigate issues to become better educated, but that process of “research” in fact leading further down a road of misinformation. We also tried out a number of engagement activities that put us in intellectual roleplaying situations of being intuitors, lawyers, game developers, and so on.

Some of my big takeaways from the class:

• Being immersed in an activity that feels like information gathering and assessing may still fail to achieve critical thinking goals. There’s no objective flashing light that indicates, yes, research-feeling activity is indeed research! And furthermore, the frameworks of news and criticism and skepticism and investigation have all been extremely muddled in our current media and political climate. It’s disturbing to realize how little control we have in some ways over this drift. 
• At the same time, there’s something sobering in identifying that, while the current moment is quite muddled, a big piece of that is about emotions and relationships. How much are we driven by the avoidant or conflicting emotions of fear of the unknown and the other? To what extent can we honestly disclose these emotions with others? And if so, what does a relationship that involves honesty and also the possibility for some kind of transformation and skill-building look like? 
• I think within librarianship we talk more about knowledge and information and literacies than relationship-building, but to be honest, I think we’d do very well to see ourselves as relationship-builders first and foremost. I’m curious what it would look like to build the kind of trust on a community level necessary to encourage people to engage with us earnestly and reveal some of their false steps and biases. I think assuming that people will grow just when given access to a specific alternative viewpoint or resource (or even class or project for that matter) is not enough - we need to see ourselves as uniquely able to cultivate long-term relationships full of repeated engagement and a wide variety of interventions. Our public libraries often do a much better job at this than academic libraries, and it may be idealistic to think academic libraries can truly take on this role of relationship-building, but I believe in this as an ideal to work towards very strongly. 
• More on the pedagogy side, I’m definitely interested in the idea of intellectual roles as part of an activity. One thing we discussed in our small groups is how rarely we have the opportunity to truly “play” with the content we learn. Several of my friends participated in policy debate in high school, and it always struck me how differently they thought about arguments and frameworks of knowledge - they were constantly picking these apart to understand their structure, and to use in that characteristically weird piecemeal debate way. But I believe that kind of adventurous picking-apart could have a lot of value in a wide variety of contexts, and think a version of the activity we tried out (probably something over the course of several days and not as mentally taxing as writing while listening to radio) could be a great fit!

 

Readings 

“Shepard (2000) summed it up well when she quoted this observation by Graue (1993): “Assessment and instruction are often conceived as curiously separate in both time and purpose” (p. 4). The key to high-quality formative assessment is to intertwine the two.” (Greenstein 2010)

 I love this idea of weaving assessment into the heart of curriculum via formative assessment. Before it came up in our class earlier this semester, I had never encountered the phrase “formative assessment” or thought about the possibilities of assessment within the class (as opposed to tests of knowledge, or instructor surveys at the end of the course). Greenstein makes a wonderful argument for the efficacy of formative learning, and lays out what this might look like as an essential, reflexive aspect of writing curricula.

Greenstein specifically imagines formative assessment as helping courses transition between stages of a cycle: objective/goals/standards, targeted instruction, informed teaching, data analysis, responding to data, and back to objectives, goals, and standards. Interestingly, Greenstein places data analysis and responding to data as discrete stages of this cycle. In practice, I think it’s more likely that formative instruction involves data analytics at every step, as more personalized digital assessments make their way into classrooms of all kinds (certainly remote/online learning but in-person as well).

I’m curious where the dividing line is between formative assessment in support of a classroom community and formative assessment as a method of personalization/fragmentation of the classroom. In other words, does formative assessment advance the goals of both learner-centric and community-centric environments (using Bransford et al’s learner, knowledge, assessment, and community-centricity framework)? I can see these methods helping teachers of large public school classrooms understand what the students are experiencing for instance, but how can they be applied to increase a sense that students belong to a learning community?

I feel like newer LMS’s like Gradecraft suggests an interesting take on incorporating some formative strategies in emphasizing choose-your-own-adventure/buffets of projects (that each provide the instructor with both students and instructors indicators of progress) as opposed to merely having summative exams. Students have some awareness that their peers are pursuing their own combination of projects, and there is a social and summative nudging to achieve more points, but in general this implementation of Gradecraft (I’m thinking specifically of Makerspaces in Winter 2017) is able to dispense with summative assessment. As a student, I found this approach very effective in combining my personal goals and ideas while not sacrificing a sense of community (i.e. I didn’t feel so isolated in pursuing projects or incompatible with others’ goals, which I could imagine happening with even more personalization).

 Finally, the concept of “knowledge-centered” learning environments that Brandsford et al. articulate sheds some interesting light on our previous discussions of teaching media literacies/fluencies:

“Effective environments must also be knowledge centered. It is not sufficient only to attempt to teach general problem solving and thinking skills; the ability to think and solve problems requires well-organized knowledge that is accessible in appropriate contexts.” (Brandsford et al. 1999)

What is the appropriate level of organization of knowledge and context specificity that learners need to learn the nebulous set of skills contained in “media literacy?” Instead of thinking of this problem from the perspective of the concepts and frameworks, perhaps we could think of it more in terms of the type of learning environment that could succeed and take on media literacy-boosting projects -- I continue to think of Nora’s example of building literacies around sexual health and education in a sex ed course. This feels like the right balance of specificity and the right type of learning community to make significant headway with media literacy/fluency. Perhaps instead of trying to do everything, we could identify a kind of pathway between specific learning interventions, courses, communities, etc. -- like a little archipelago of skill-building across time.