Speaker 1: Hi, this is Jason Johnston, Instructional Designer at the College of Social Work, University of Kentucky, and today we're going to talk about e-learning, grading, and assessment. Why and how do we assess and give feedback to our students? So, let's begin. We grade students for multiple reasons. First, because we must. Someone is usually telling us teachers that we need to hand in grades, and that's the way it's always been done, although that is changing in some sectors. Higher powers need a way to evaluate learning with data, and this is the assessment above learning, although sometimes it could be called assessment regarding learning or about learning, even against learning, despite learning, or opposite learning. But there is some good reason for this. For accreditation, graduation requirements, certifications, and funding. Sometimes there needs to be an assessment above learning. Next reason we assess students is to give them feedback. We want to instruct students on how they can improve, and you know this works. When we instruct students, give them good, solid feedback. It actually increases their understanding. This is the assessment for learning. Now, this kind of feedback should be dynamic. It should not just be teacher to student, but from student to teacher as well. This is called formative assessment, and it's a tool used by a teacher to adjust their ongoing instructional procedures or by students to adjust their current learning tactics. Popham states that research shows conclusively that formative assessment does improve learning. Some examples of this are mid-class or mid-unit survey, daily exit tickets, and this is when a student either electronically or analog, they fill out some sort of form to give the teacher some sort of feedback on what they learned or didn't learn that day. Or low-stakes tests and quizzes that are graded, but not necessarily entered into the final grades. We also grade students for measurement. That is to assess what has taken place. Did it work? Did the students learn? And we call this assessment of learning. We want to evaluate what they have learned or haven't, and this should be an assessment of the student's learning as well as our teaching. Some examples of this are midterm or final tests, final projects, or other non-tests like interviews, observations, portfolios, etc. Harlan and James stated that summative assessment is concerned with progress towards the big ideas rather than the learning in specific activities. So we have formative assessment that happens along the way. We have summative assessment that happens at the end, and using a combination of both formative and summative assessment can create a synergistic effect on academic success, and this is what we want in the end. Our assessments aren't just to see what the students have learned, but they're there to actually increase learning, and this is the ideal for anything we implement into our classes, that they are to increase the learning of the students. Here are some of my resources if you'd like to take a look at any of those. Thanks for listening, and if you want to learn anything more about specifically grading and rubrics in Canvas, you can click that link below. If you have any other questions, please comment below or contact me here.