[Editor's Note: This is a guest post by John Jones (no relation!), who is an assistant instructor at UT-Austin and one of the hosts of the HASTAC Forum on Grading 2.0. -- JBJ]
One of the primary goals of teaching is to prepare students for life outside the classroom, either by providing them with job-specific skills or preparing them to be engaged & informed citizens or some combination of the two. As digital technologies become increasingly vital to both the acquisition of job skills as well as civic and cultural engagement, instructors have begun to recognize that they must change their approaching to assessing student work. While traditional grading tends to do a decent job of evaluating individual student work, it isn’t always the best means of measuring the kinds of skills that are valuable in the digital world, such as collaboration, creativity, and the use of emerging technologies.
In response to these challenges, this week HASTAC (the Humanities Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) is hosting a forum on the role of grading, assessment, and evaluation in the digital age, providing a place for educators to share their thoughts about these issues, specifically:
- How do we better align grading and assessment techniques so that they are more in line with how students learn today?
- How can digital media be used to develop new grading and assessment strategies?
- How should we grade, assess, teach, learn, and structure the learning experience for students in the digital age?
If you are interested in these issues or in any other issues related to grading and assessment, please visit the forum and join in the conversation.
Image by flickr user lordsutch / CC licensed
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[...] is a blogging site that talks about technology for professors. They have a guest post this morning asking for folks to join a discussion on how to evaluate student performance. I can’t help [...]