Classroom experience and assessment are often issues that are struggled with by every level of education including but not limited to higher education. The goal of all assessments be they classroom, institutional or even national level is to have a measure that is comparable among students so as to record and gage learning outcomes. The problem is that not all assessments are equal or as useful as others. While personalized assessments are useful for instructors they are hardly comparable outside of the single classroom, standardized tests or even trade level licensure exams (i.e. standardized tests) are highly comparable but often do not express the breadth of learning. As a student the experience of assessment has been broad with some seemingly being very effective and other assessment feeling like a waste of time, or at the least a form of hoop jumping that did not aide the student learning or more important the demonstration of progress.
As a student in higher education I can think of two examples of assessment that proved to fall into these broad categories. The most effective assessment tool I have experienced is an interactive cumulative online portfolio. In this circumstance students submitted nearly every assignment to...
(Strudler, 2011) The professor was then able to review on a weekly basis the progress of students and intervene when scores were poor or when a particular student was falling behind in his or her work. Even the quarterly and final written papers were submitted to the system so that the professor had them as soon as drafts were complete in a format that allowed rapid communication and easy access. The experience of an online portfolio did several things for me, first it gave me incentive to stay abreast with coursework on a weekly basis so I was actively demonstrating my learning in a progressive way and felt as if even though the class had a relatively high learning curve there was instant access to the professor and other students if there was a problem or a concern about an assignment. In other words I did not have to wait until class met the next time and take up teaching time to ask a question about a rudimentary aspect of an assignment, or something that didn't make sense to me. Most importantly the portfolio program gave me incentive to keep up on my coursework and not to procrastinate assignments until a few hours before…
