Can learning technology help retire high- stakes exams? Coffee and - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Coffee and Cookies at TI Lab

• Dr. Nora Dittmann (LET)

nora.dittmann@let.ethz.ch

27.11.2018 1

Can learning technology help retire high- stakes exams?

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What do we mean?

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A high-stakes test is any test used to make important decisions about students, but maybe also about educators, schools, or universities. In general, “high stakes” means that test scores are used to determine consequences like such as passing into the next semester or failure (having to repeat the subject, enrolling in ‘remedial’ study etc.). The primary goal of a summative assessment is to help us measure a student’s achievement at the end of a dedicated instructional period. In most cases, results are recorded as scores or grades, that are then factored into our students’ academic record.

«High Stakes» Exams at ETH

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Summative Assessment

Use and function

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• Summative assessments can serve as a guide to improving teaching

methods.

• Summative assessments serves selection.
• Summative assessments help teachers and administrators alike, in

improving curriculum and curriculum planning, when consistent gaps are detected between student knowledge and learning targets.

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Formative assessment

Cerego’s strengths

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Cerego can:

• ffer real-time reporting of results,
• allow stakeholders to understand students’ strengths and weaknesses,
• guide them to make valid, actionable interpretations of the test data.
• Such assessments can enable educators to see, evaluate, and respond to

student work more quickly than can traditional assessments.

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Retrieval Practice

What Cerego does….. Test-enhanced learning

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Test-enhanced learning is the idea that the process of remembering concepts

• r facts—retrieving them from memory—increases long-term retention of those

concepts or facts. It is one of the most consistent findings in cognitive psychology: various types of “tests” promote retrieval and therefor promote learning better when compared to “simply” studying without testing. (Roediger and Butler 2011; Roediger and Pyc 2012). But: If you want students to be able apply their knowledge, analyze complex situations, and synthesize different points of view, be sure to let them know that retrieval practice will help them learn the basic information they need for these skills—but that retrieval alone is not sufficient.

Retrieval practive

Cerego does….. Test-enhanced learning

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«Point of Desirable Difficulty»

Using the «forgetting Curve» to determine it?

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• Individual differences for ex.: attention and

memory span

• Prior knowledge of the learner
• Importance / relevance of the material
• Repetition. How often is the learner

exposed to this new information? Just once

• r several times, spaced over a period of

days or weeks?

• Retrieval. Is the learner required to retrieve

and use this knowledge periodically?

• Type of learning material:
• Laws and Principles after 30 days 5%
• Poems: 25-50% (Michel und Felix Novak (1990) )
• Concepts?

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Example prior knowledge

• Performance of reproducing the postion of 16-20 chess pieces
• Variation:
• Expertise / prior knowledge (chess experts versus novices)
• Position of chess pieces (meaningfull versus random)

meaningfull random Correct reproduction Position of chess pieces

Results

Experts Novices

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Can learning technology like Cerego help retire rote learning and head cramming?

Can learning technology like Cerego help retire high-stakes exams?

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What kind of exams are we talking about?

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Exams that are narrowly focused, asking students under stress, to recall a huge stack of factual information in

• rder to list, describe, identify or explain?

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Authentic, Competence oriented exam tasks

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Exams that do provide authentic opportunity for creative problem-solving, analytic thought or evaluation of concepts.