Tired of standard assessments that don’t really tell you if a student has mastered your learning objectives? Learn how to create collaborative assessments using a wiki and associated rubric for grading. Use your learning objective to create a robust, transparent assessment designed to be completed as a group.
Learning Objectives:
- Describe the components of a collaborative group wiki assessment.
- Identify best practices for groups and wikis as well as rubrics.
- Explain the advantages and pitfalls of collaborative work, assessments and rubrics.
In this session, we will examine a collaborative assessment set up as a wiki in BlackBoard. This assessment can easily be adapted to other learning management systems or wiki platforms. A group wiki is a great way to ease into collaborative work on a small scale. The associated rubric can be used to assess not only mastery of the learning objective, but students’ reasoning and problem-solving skills within the group.
Prior learning and student experiences are incorporated as the group must work together using their reasoning and problem-solving skills to arrive at a consensus for the solution. Transparency is achieved as individuals as well as the group are required to clearly show their work, and the instructor can easily witness the interactions of the group throughout the assessment.
Using a stated learning objective, a group wiki is created with a scenario followed by 5 questions. Each student in the group will post their individual answers to the first 2 questions as individual wiki pages. As a group they will decide the single best approach to the problem. The group will then post a single page with the answers to the last 3 questions. The associated rubric has criteria based on the specific skills involved as well as criteria evaluating individuals’ contributions and participation within the wiki. While the scenario presented is from an engineering economics course, this design could be used in any discipline.
We will cover the creation of and best practices for groups and wikis as well as rubrics. We will explore the advantages and pitfalls of collaborative work, assessments and rubrics. We will also examine the benefits of authentic, transparent assessments.
Since various participants LMS’ will be represented, we will not focus on the technical creation of groups, wikis or rubrics. Instead we will focus on the logistical progression from learning objective to assessment (scenario and associated questions) to criteria for the rubric. We will also focus on the individual vs group contributions (different parts of the assessment).