Session Information
WERA SES 08 B, Researching the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Focusing on Assessment at Higher Education Institutions Teacher Training: Innovative Practices Expanding Boundaries
Symposium
Contribution
Three shifts in higher education are transforming the preparation of future teachers: learner-centered assessments, performance tasks to measure instructional competencies, and digital teaching platforms. In the 21st century it is critical that teachers are learning and being taught using the tools and methods widely available in the lives of preschool through 12th grade students. This research explores the digital teaching platform.The affordances that online learning provide such as instant communication, unlimited potential for collaboration, digital badging, and automated learning analytics create new opportunities for faculty use of assessment data to personalize teacher preparation in higher education programs. A significant change in assessment for faculty is not only the automatic recording of teacher-candidate mastery of learning outcomes across courses and programs, but also having the data that traces how teacher-candidates solve problems including requests for help, feedback, time spent, and resources used. Most importantly, the new learner-centered assessments using a digital teaching platform mirror the likely learning process of the 21st century students that teachers are preparing to instruct. Learner-centered assessments reflect the 21st century emphasis on developing people who think with knowledge to create novel solutions and products. The U.S. Education Technology Plan 2010 describes how both learning and assessment powered by technology emphasize desired learning outcomes for all students including collaboration, creativity, and application and integration of knowledge from multiple disciplines. Huba and Freed (2000) defined assessment in a learner-centered approach as, “an activity assigned by the professor that yields comprehensible information for analyzing, discussing, and judging a learner’s performance on valued abilities and skills” (p.12). Using Huba and Freed’s definition, the learner-centered assessments in higher education teacher preparation need to provide data on growth of valued instructional competencies such as planning a lesson sequence that demonstrates command of content knowledge, the ability to use evidence-based pedagogy and assessment, and skilfulness in analyzing student work to determine mastery of standards taught as well as individual student needs and strengths. Learner-centered assessments significantly change the role of assessment in teacher preparation programs including shifting the “typical” role for professors and teacher-candidates, the instructional purpose of assessment, and the relationship between assessment and learning.
References
Frederiksen, L. (2013). Digital Badges. Public Services Quarterly, 9(4), 321-325. doi:10.1080/15228959.2013.842414 Huba, M. E., & Freed, J. E. (2000). Learner-centered assessment on college campuses: shifting the focus from teaching to learning. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Murray, J. (2011). Inventing the medium: Principles of interaction design as cultural practice. Boston: MIT Press. Perkins, D. (2003). In King Arthur’s Round Table: How Collaborative Conversations Create Smart Organizations. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley Press. Rose, D., & Meyer, A. (2002). Teaching every student in the digital age: Universal design for learning. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
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