Written by Ellie Louson / Image by Shahid Abdullah from Pixabay
Assessment
There are many options for assessment in your experiential course. In addition to assessing performance or content retention, you have the option to assess students’ holistic contribution, as well as to focus on engagement with the experiential process.
Assessment of Student Work
- ▶️Consider holistic and/or assignment level assessment. Will you be more focused on a holistic assessment, meaning their overall contribution and engagement with the course? There may be specific components of the course where assignment-level assessment is a better fit, eg. evaluating deliverables, specific performance, or content retention/mastery.
- ▶️You can assess team deliverables based on a rubric evaluating levels of quality with explicit descriptions for work that fails to meet, meets, or exceeds expectations.
- ▶️Assessment should reflect both an opportunity for students to demonstrate mastery of knowledge as well as their ability to apply what they know to a novel environment/challenge. Some assessment methods capture intended learning outcomes; other methods should be designed to capture emergent learning outcomes.
- ▶️Whatever your choice of assessment, be upfront and transparent with your students about expectations. Keep feedback central; a focus on grades can interrupt student ownership, while a focus on feedback reinforces relationships and students’ sense of ownership (see our GORP model for details).
Assessment As Learning
In addition to assessment towards their grade, experiential courses offer opportunities for instructors and students to learn from the course processes and from each other.
- How do students charge forward in a project and stumble into/ respond to barriers?
- How can faculty follow student work, prototypes, collaborations, and goals with their expertise to coach students to their next sprint?
- Assessment of your own coaching: are you modeling the role shift you want to see in students? If you want student groups to give good feedback to each other, are you demonstrating good feedback practices with other faculty in public so students can see how to do it?
- Focus on feedback-rich classroom practices and formative assessment.
Evaluation of Process and Reflection
Give students the opportunity to reflect on their progress a few times during the project. Reflection leads to metacognitive moments, where students think about their own thinking, creates opportunities for deep learning, and can be transformative. This also helps you understand team dynamics and how students assigned work within their teams. Reflections can be written or more open-format, like art projects. Reflection prompts can be specific to your course as well as more general prompts about their learning experiences.
🔧Photovoice is a well-documented visual reflection tool used in qualitative participatory community-based research projects. MSU’s University Outreach and Engagement (engage@msu.edu) offers workshops about Photovoice. Here are some Photovoice resources including a Photovoice training site, an implementation guide, and an organizer’s manual.
▶️You can use reflections to:
- evaluate project progress and topical knowledge
- evaluate team communication
- evaluate use of feedback
- evaluate how individuals learn their way through challenges
- evaluate student identity exploration
🔧Table of written vs. open-format reflections
| Written reflections | Open-format/interpretive reflections | ||
| Pros | Cons | Pros | Cons |
| Explicit framing of student feelings and growth Easier to standardize responses Good for maintaining student accountability of their own growth and experience | Potentially restrictive to student expression Potential reduction in student ownership of contentCan resemble a traditional homework assignment, reinstates traditional power dynamics | Encourages student creativity and exploration Potentially the most honest representation of student experience Could facilitate more meaningful discussion | Difficult to standardize and interpret Difficult to glean data from Harder to communicate expectations |
Sample prompt questions:
- What strengths do you bring to your team? Are you using the strengths you anticipated using, or are new/different capabilities emerging as you work on your events?
- What do you most appreciate about some of the other students in the course? Rather than naming names, identify characteristics, activities, behaviors, etc.
- Has the course changed the way you are thinking about your work in the future? In what ways?
- Are there things that you would change about the course? What suggestions would you make to the instructors for future classes?