9 Ways to Assess Student Learning Online
Student assessment has changed in the new millennium. While there is something to be said for the old-fashioned paper and pencil methods, new technologies are being developed daily to help teachers with this task.
In this article, we will look at different ways to assess student learning using technology. Here are nine online assessment methods that are sure to enhance training, engage your audience, and give teachers insight into their students’ learning. But first, let’s understand the evaluation process.
What is a rating?
Simply put, assessment is the process of gathering information about what students know based on their educational experiences. The results are usually used to identify areas where improvement is needed and to ensure that the course content meets the learning needs.
What is the purpose of the assessment?
By definition, the common goal of assessment is to evaluate and improve student learning, but the goals may vary slightly depending on the type of assessment used.
There are two basic types:
Formative assessment takes place within an online course or lesson and is used to determine how well a student is learning the material. They are at their best when they are ongoing, consistent, and provide critical feedback to students.
A summative assessment is sometimes referred to as a final exam and measures what the student has learned after completing the course. They can verify how well your content supports the overall learning objectives of the course.
Clearly, assessment is not just about grades. When meaningful and well-constructed, they help students prepare for success by challenging them to think, interact, and apply their knowledge to answer questions, solve problems, and communicate information.
How do you assess students online?
There are several approaches to student assessment:
- Online quizzes
- Essay questions
- Drag and drop operations
- Online interviews
- Dialogue simulation
- Online polls
- Game-type activities
- Peer ratings and reviews
- Forum posts
The best method will vary depending on educational needs and goals. For example, an online quiz will be suitable if your goal is to quickly measure the knowledge gained. However, if you want to test your students’ interviewing skills, it is better to use a dialogue simulation.
9 Ways to Assess Student Learning Online
Let’s look at how we can use nine of the most common assessment methods to support student learning. Check out this infographic for an overview.
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Online quizzes
Quizzes are a traditional assessment tool. Additionally, when combined with technology, they are an excellent way to engage students in learning. Quiz questions can take a number of forms, such as multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, and bullet points. One of the advantages of quizzes is that they are short and easy to grade. Another is that the order of questions and options can be randomized, making each student’s quiz unique.
Online quizzes are ideal for measuring learning outcomes among a wide audience. Because every student takes the same test, you can compare and contrast results across classrooms, schools, or communities.
An ungraded online quiz can be taken prior to the start of the lesson to provide a baseline measurement of the student’s existing knowledge. You can also include a knowledge review test in the module to reinforce the concepts taught in the lesson, or take a final graded test at the end of the course to evaluate the students’ overall performance.
How do I create an online quiz?
Online quizzes can be easily created using an eLearning authoring toolkit such as the iSpring Suite. iSpring Suite includes a quiz builder that offers 14 question types. You simply need to choose the appropriate templates to quickly and easily create a quiz for your students. You can improve your test by providing detailed feedback, adding informational slides, and creating individualized learning paths based on how well each employee does on the quiz.
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Open-ended/essay questions
Open-ended or essay-type questions are one of the most popular methods of qualitative assessment. It challenges students to explore their thoughts, feelings and opinions while testing their overall understanding of the topic. This type of question encourages critical thinking and is best suited for higher level learning assessments. Essay questions require more time for students to think, organize, and compose their answers.
How do I create an open-ended assessment?
Open-ended assessments are one of the question types available in the iSpring Suite. Unlike many other question types, they cannot be automatically graded in online courses, so instructors will need to take the time to review them one by one.
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Drag-and-drop activities
Drag-and-drop is a type of assessment that demonstrates a student’s ability to connect information and apply knowledge to solve a practical problem. You can incorporate both images and text into the drag-and-drop activity, giving it a real-world feel that’s challenging and engaging.
This type of assessment is essential to use when you want students to be able to apply knowledge in a real situation.
How can I create a drag and drop activity?
iSpring Suite provides a drag-and-drop template that allows text boxes, images, and shapes to be moved to a specific location on the page. To create an assessment, you need to upload images to the question template and then simply specify the placement target.
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Online interviews
You can incorporate video conferencing into your online learning to give your learning a more personal touch. During short online interviews, students can demonstrate their knowledge in, for example, language, music, nursing and other courses where the mastery of specific skills is an important requirement. Sometimes it can be beneficial to conduct group interviews – for example for team project reports.
Interviews can also include mentoring, which allows students to get immediate feedback from instructors and helps them feel more accountable for their studies.
How can I produce an online converse?
You can partake online exchanges using web conferencing tools like Zoom. You’ll get the stylish results if you plan the interview before it starts. Prepare your questions in advance and schedule a meeting time. Give your online learners a way to give feedback or interact with exchanges.
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Dialogue simulation
Dialogue simulation is a way to train scholars for real- life exchanges with guests, associates, and others. When creating a discussion exertion grounded on a situation the pupil might encounter at work, let the pupil know what to anticipate and give a safe place for them to exercise their responses and responses.
For illustration, you can use dialogue simulations to help your scholars develop deals and client service chops or test how well they’re set for a job interview. These conditioning can also be a good literacy support tool for educated workers who want to refresh chops they have not used in a while.
How can I produce a dialogue simulation?
You can produce dialogue simulation- suchlike conditioning by hand using simple slides, but creating this kind of branching storyboard in PowerPoint takes a lot of time and trouble. But with iSpring Suite, you can snappily and fluently design a conversational sim.
launch by mapping out the script you want to produce. Communicate a script and script, choose an applicable character and position from the erected- in library or upload your own, and produce a dialogue with iSpring by offering scholars choice of answers and furnishing feedback. As with a typical quiz, scholars will gain points for correct answers and lose points for inaccurate bones
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Online pates
checks allow you to capture feedback directly from your followership about their literacy experience. They can be used to measure anything from satisfaction with literacy( Kirkpatrick Level 1 feedback) to why a pupil made a decision during a assignment. Online checks are veritably engaging for scholars because they allow them to partake their opinions, be heard, and are quick to complete.
You can also use check questions when you want to snappily snare and concentrate your scholars’ attention on commodity important or to break the ice during an online group discussion. For the ultimate, you can simply take a mood check.
How do I produce an online check question?
Still, you can use the erected- in check tools, If you are hosting webinars through a web conferencing result. There are also some technical online platforms like SurveyMonkey that allow you to produce, shoot and dissect checks.
You can also produce a check using eLearning authoring tools similar as iSpring Suite. Just choose apre-made question template supported by iSpring QuizMaker, write a choice of question and answer or textbook box for open- concluded answers.
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Play-type conditioning
Game- type conditioning turn a series of test questions into a game. For illustration, a trivia game might challenge scholars to answer a certain number of questions within a certain time period and award points grounded on the number of correct answers.
Game- grounded assessments are considered fun, not” tests”, so are generally a good index of factual chops and knowledge. In addition, they’ve been shown to enhance literacy by promoting the development ofnon-cognitive chops similar as discipline, threat- taking, collaboration and problem- working.
Add game- type conditioning when you want to engage and challenge your scholars in anon-traditional way. Organizations have set up that gaming conditioning work well for training staff, while seminaries have set up that high- achieving scholars enjoy contending with their peers in literacy games.
How do I produce game- type conditioning?
Quizlet and Kahoot are two popular apps that preceptors can use to produce quick interactive literacy games. Quizlet allows you to produce a study set of online flashcards to educate terms and delineations, while with Kahoot you can produce engaging quizzes and let your scholars earn points by answering snappily and rightly.
There are also numerous other apps like GimKit, Constructive, and Plickers that can add a gaming experience to the classroom.
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Peer Review and Review
Peer grading turns the tables so that scholars sit in the educator’s seat and allow scholars to review and edit each other’s work. similar conditioning give each party a chance to reflect on their knowledge and also communicate their feedback in a harmonious and structured way.
How do I produce a peer review assessment?
Third- party platforms, similar as TurnItIn’s Feedback Studio, allow scholars to read, review, and grade one or further papers submitted by their classmates using rubrics or specified assessment questions. preceptors can log in to track individual exertion participation and track commentary or feedback from associates.
As a stylish practice, the educator should collude out and easily explain the way of the peer review and evaluation process previous to launch. Be sure to give each party with a rubric or set of guidelines to follow to insure that the assessment is conducted in a harmonious manner.
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Forum Posts
A forum is an online discussion forum organized around a content. Asking scholars to contribute to a forum post is a great way to gauge their understanding, spark their interest, and support their literacy. In this exertion, scholars are given a critical thinking question grounded on either the assignment or the reading and are asked to suppose about both. Their answers are posted on the forum and their peers get a chance to respond.
Use this system when you want scholars to interact, communicate, and unite as part of the literacy process while checking that they understand the content.
How do I create a forum post rating activity?
Start by creating an online bulletin board exclusively for your class in your LMS or some external platform like ActiveBoard. Identify common themes or topics that you can align messages to. Set participation goals and guidelines that explain acceptable standards for posting (respect others, avoid profanity or personal criticism, etc.).
The facilitator should regularly review the contributions and provide constructive feedback or guidance to the participants.
10 online assessment tools for distance learning
We have already mentioned some assessment tools that are perfect for online assessment. Let’s summarize what software instructors might need for which purposes and consider some other tools.
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iSpring Suite
iSpring Suite is a comprehensive set of eLearning tools that teachers and instructors love. It allows you to create interactive quizzes, surveys, and dialogue simulations for student assessment, as well as PowerPoint-based courses, video tutorials, interactions, and flipbooks. Despite the many options, this toolkit is extremely easy to use and is perfectly suited for those with no experience in developing eLearning content.
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Socratic
Socrative is a quiz creation tool that allows you to create tests with multiple choice, true/false and short answer questions. It also has some interesting features such as exit tickets for students to get feedback on the lesson and a fun Space Race game where students “race” to the finish line.
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Spiral
Spiral is a set of 5 formative assessment apps. You can provide real-time assessments and hear from all your students, turn slides into a discussion thread, allow students to create and share collaborative presentations, and turn videos into a live chat with questions and quizzes.
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Peergrade
Peergrade is an online platform for hosting student feedback sessions. Once you set up your assignment, students begin working on and then submit their work—text, files, videos, links, and even Google Docs. Students can view each other’s work and respond to feedback. There is also a teacher overview where they can see everything that is happening in the assignment.
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EdPuzzle
EdPuzzle is a tool designed specifically for working with videos. It allows teachers and students to add comments, resources, commentaries and quizzes to videos. Instructors can also check if students are watching the videos, how many times they are watching each section, and if they understand the content.
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Mentimeter
Mentimeter allows you to create interactive presentations with 13 types of interactive questions, including word clouds and a quiz, and watch students vote/answer questions and engage with the presentation in real time. With this tool, you can export results to a PDF or Excel file and analyze student results.
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Google Forms
Google Forms is a simple, widely used tool for creating surveys and graded quizzes. You can create multiple-choice or short-answer questions for students to complete, determine correct answers and points, and provide feedback for correct and incorrect answers.
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Quiz
Quizalize is very similar to Kahoot. It lets you choose from over 12,000 officially released tests to teacher-created resources, or lets you create your own. You can get instant data on each student’s progress and automatically assign different resources to students based on their quiz scores.
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Nearpod
Nearpod is a web-based tool for creating interactive classrooms with engaging activities such as virtual reality, simulations, and gamified quizzes. It lets you stay on top of how your students are doing with formative assessment including polls, open-ended questions, drawings and more. You can get student statistics in real-time and in post-session reports.
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Fluency tutor
Fluency Tutor is designed to track and assess students’ oral reading progress. You can share reading excerpts with your class and receive recordings of assigned passages. The tool comes with a library of over 500 ready-made fluent reading passages.
Final thoughts
Online assessments are a critical part of e-learning and should be done with the same level of care and rigor that you put into creating your learning content. The good news is that you don’t have to be a programming genius to put them together. There are many online assessment tools that allow you to create engaging online assessment tasks. Choose the student learning assessment method and related software that fits your needs and the outcomes you want to achieve.
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