Social software - assessment

Managing a social software teaching/learning environment

Integrated assessments
Give appropriate weighting
Stage assessment
Include individual as well as group components
Use peer and self assessment
Include reflective activities
Use assessment rubrics

Assessment issues to think about when designing an activity using social software include the following.

Integrate assessments

  • Integrate assessment of learning with the assessment of the quality of the activity's finished product.
  • Make the assessment task central to the activity you have set up in a social software site. In other words, make the activity the assessment.
  • Specify assessment criteria that reflect real-world expectations.
  • Ensure that standards are authentic and relevant to the activity.

Give appropriate weighting

  • Ensure assessment weightings reflect the amount of time and effort students are required to put in to the activity. It would not be unreasonable to allocate 50% of the marks for a unit to the work students do in a social software activity.
  • Factor in time students will need to learn how to use the software, and how to work effectively in the environment created. Establishing roles within groups and negotiating tasks, structure, etc also takes considerable time.
  • Stipulate as clearly as possible the amount of time you expect students to put into the activity.

Stage assessment

  • Break down activity into assessable stages to ensure groups devote sufficient attention to the introductory and planning stages, and pace their work effectively.
  • Review groups' plans and activities at each stage. This should also alert you to dysfunctional groups and unworkable project plans in time for you to provide more support where necessary.
  • Provide feedback at the completion of each stage.

Include individual as well as group components

  • Include an individual assessment component to provide an incentive for students to produce excellent work on their own, choosing their own area of interest and style.
  • Assess the group's finished product to provide an incentive for students to develop their communication, negotiation and teamwork skills as well as their understanding of the subject matter.

Use peer and self assessment

A good peer and self assessment scheme should:

  • provide an incentive for all group members to contribute
  • involve an assessment of individuals' contributions to important work that is not clearly visible in the finished product
  • encourage students to reflect on teamwork processes and learning outcomes
  • provide an opportunity for formative assessment (if peers assess each other's work early in the activity, as well as late)
  • reduce your marking load.

Peer and self assessment issues when using social software include the following:

  • In general, it is very difficult for teachers to assess individual students' contributions to collaboratively-created websites and discussions. In a MediaWiki site you can view the 'history' tab for each page and work out which students made which changes, but the process is cumbersome. Also, to assess individual contributions to a collaboratively-produced item will work against the cooperative approach you are probably trying to develop. Tracking individuals' work through the history pages should really only be used as a last resort. Providing a group score for collaborative work with individual scores or weightings calculated on peer and self assessment scores is generally a better, fairer system.
  • If possible, set peer and self assessment criteria and weighting in consultation with students, to ensure they are clear about their responsibilities and why they are important.
  • One peer and self assessment submission at the conclusion of the task may be sufficient, but having students assess their own and their peers' work several times throughout a long task will provide opportunities for useful feedback in time to improve poor performance.
  • Include a peer and self assessment form in a MediaWiki or Drupal-SMF site, attach it to a discussion topic or include it elsewhere in the unit materials.You could ask students to complete the form either individually or as a group. A simple peer assessment form can be created in a Word document (41 KB). For more information on peer and self assessment, see the Institute of Teaching and Learning's Peer assessment page.

Include reflective activities

  • Include a reflective activity in the assessment items, to encourage a deep approach to learning and hence a deeper understanding of the subject. This may take the form of peer and self assessments, or you could get students to make regular reflections in their ePortfolio.
  • Allocate a proportion of the marks for the subject to the reflective activity to signal its importance and encourage students to take it seriously.
  • Encourage students to reflect on:
    • how they can relate the theory they are learning to their everyday experience, to help ground abstract concepts in a real context and thus make them more understandable, relevant and memorable
    • how the new knowledge they have gained relates to similar concepts in different disciplines, to help them organise and structure their evolving knowledge into a coherent whole
    • how they have learned important concepts in the subject, how they learn best and the kinds of things they find difficult to learn.

Use assessment rubrics

  • Provide a rubric that sets out the assessment criteria clearly and includes what is required from participants as individuals and as a group. This will have the added advantage of making marking easier.
  • Examples of how a wiki may be assessed are:

References

Intel Education 2008, Famine wiki and survey rubric, Designing effective projects: famine: assessing wikis <http://www97.intel.com/en/ProjectDesign/UnitPlanIndex/Famine/famine_wiki_rubric.htm> (accessed 28 February 2008).

University of Minnesota Digital Media Center 2008, Rubric for a team process wiki <https://wiki.umn.edu/twiki/pub/TeachingWithWikis/AssessingWikis/team_rubric.pdf> (accessed 28 February 2008).

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3rd November 2011