T05: Changing the Channel on Assessments


By Jennifer M. Seat


Information

Pandemic teaching led to rapid changes in practice (Trevisan et al. 2020). A hallmark of solid pedagogy is preparing learners for assessments combining multiple cognitive tasks (Brookhart 2024). Making sense of the rapidly changing landscape of educational practice while maintaining academic rigor can cause stress for educators. Many learning goals in statistics courses advocate for instruction that aligns with the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy (Bargagliotti et al. 2020). Efficient assessments that blend high-level questions and conceptual engagement can be cumbersome with traditional assessment methods due to time concerns, significantly as class sizes grow in K-12 and college settings. Facilitating assessment in a manageable and engaging way for learners and educators is essential for the field moving forward. With this growing list of challenges, how can statistics educators "tune into" strong assessment practices that weather the storms of current events? Demonstrations from a summative assessment used in a senior-level high school mathematics class in an urban setting with enrollments varying from 20 to 36 will show how pandemic tools can be prized strategies for creating “must-see” assessments. Both the questioning strategy and the evaluation process will be shown to provide insight into how this new "channel" of assessment can be a better way to "tune in" to student knowledge.