Formative Assessment, Learning Data Analytics and Gamification

In ICT Education

Santi Caballé, Robert Clarisó

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780128036679
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Formative Assessment, Learning Data Analytics and Gamification: An ICT Education discusses the challenges associated with assessing student progress given the explosion of e-learning environments, such as MOOCs and online courses that incorporate activities such as design and modeling. This book shows educators how to effectively garner intelligent data from online educational environments that combine assessment and gamification.

This data, when used effectively, can have a positive impact on learning environments and be used for building learner profiles, community building, and as a tactic to create a collaborative team. Using numerous illustrative examples and theoretical and practical results, leading international experts discuss application of automatic techniques for e-assessment of learning activities, methods to collect, analyze, and correctly visualize learning data in educational environments, applications, benefits and challenges of using gamification techniques in academic contexts, and solutions and strategies for increasing student participation and performance.

• Discusses application of automatic techniques for e-assessment of learning activities
• Presents strategies to provide immediate and useful feedback on students' activities
• Provides methods to collect, analyze, and correctly visualize learning data in educational environments
• Explains the applications, benefits, and challenges of using gamification techniques in academic contexts
• Offers solutions to increase students' participation and performance while lowering drop-out rates and retention levels

Part 1

Formative e-Assessment

Chapter 1

Collaborative e-Assessment as a Strategy for Scaffolding Self-Regulated Learning in Higher Education

V.I. Marín; A. Pérez Garcias University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Spain

Abstract

In the European Higher Education Area various challenges are apparent regarding the use of didactical strategies centered on the learner, including learning assessment and improving self-regulated learning skills in students in preparation for lifelong learning. In this chapter, a collaborative e-assessment activity using the workshop plugin of the institutional virtual learning environment (VLE) based on Moodle in a preservice teacher training course at the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain) is presented as a strategy for promoting self-regulated learning. Experimental data were collected through the use of students’ questionnaires and written reflections and the teachers’ observations of the co-assessment results. The findings confirm the positive effects of co-assessment for students’ learning and improving self-regulated learning abilities, and the workshop is valid for developing this type of e-assessment strategy in other courses. As another relevant result of the study, a model of the co-assessment strategy using the Moodle workshop plugin is proposed.

Keywords

e-Assessment; Higher education; Collaborative assessment; Peer assessment; Self-regulated learning; Preservice teacher training; Workshop; Moodle

Acknowledgments

This work is framed within the research project EDU2011-25499 Methodological strategies for integrating institutional virtual environments, personal and social learning, developed by the Educational Technology Group (GTE) of the University of the Balearic Islands since 2012 and funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of Spain, within the National Programme for Fundamental Research. It is also part of a teaching innovation project funded by the University of the Balearic Islands in the academic year 2014/15 called Learning and assessment strategies centered on the student with the use of ICT as nexus for knowledge transfer and connecting formal and informal learning.

1 Introduction

The need for didactical student-centered strategies has been made explicit since the European Higher Education Area and its premises were introduced. Students become the central focus of the teaching-learning process, including the organization of the learning process, teaching period, contact time, and learning assessment and accreditation (Ferrão, 2010), and developing self-regulation skills for lifelong learning life are essential in this endeavor.

Assessment clearly has a key role in teaching and learning since students define the curriculum according to how their work is evaluated; thus, evaluation is one of the most important elements of motivation for studying and an integral part of the learning experience for students (Keppell et al., 2006; Moccozet and Tardy, 2015). Assessment can be used to evaluate students’ outcomes and to support student learning; therefore, assessment techniques must also consider students’ participation (Ibarra Sáiz and Rodríguez Gómez, 2014; Reinholz, 2015) and should be used to empower students as self-regulated learners (Nicol and MacFarlane-Dick, 2006; Reinholz, 2015).

A key issue for assessment in higher education is formative feedback. This form of feedback is the main element of the learning process since learning from feedback offers the tools to students for building meaning and self-regulating their learning (van den Boom et al., 2004; Clark, 2012). However, previous studies have reported that students are less satisfied with formative feedback than other elements in a course (Nicol et al., 2014). Thus, considering alternative assessment strategies that include and improve formative feedback is important (Whitelock, 2010).

With these aspects in mind, the aim of this chapter is to propose a formative feedback strategy using a virtual learning environment (VLE) in the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain). This strategy promotes and scaffolds self-regulated learning in the future primary education teachers.

Research Questions

Our main interest in the experiment introduced above is to enhance the development of self-regulated learning competencies related to assessment and self-evaluation in the students.

In this sense, we aimed to develop and evaluate strategies that encourage students to be more active in the formative assessment processes.

The research questions posed in this experiment were:

RQ1: Is scaffolded student participation in assessment activities—co-assessment—a good learning strategy for the development of self-regulated learning competencies within preservice teacher training?

RQ2: Is the workshop plugin of Moodle a supportive tool that facilitates the development of assessment strategies based on the participation of students together with the teacher?

Considering these research questions, this chapter is structured into five differentiated sections. First, the framework for the study including the main concepts for the experiment is introduced: the concept of self-regulated learning; different strategies for formative assessment such as self-assessment, peer assessment, and collaborative assessment; and e-assessment with Moodle. Next, we move onto our study, its context, the characteristics of the learning activity and the phases in which the collaborative e-assessment activity was carried out. In the third section, the methodology of the study is outlined including the data collection procedures. In the fourth section, the results of the study are described and discussed in comparison with previous studies. Finally, some highlights of the study, in addition to some suggestions, are covered in Conclusions.

2 Framework

2.1 Self-Regulated Learning

Self-regulated learning can be defined as the ability of a learner to actively monitor and control his or her own learning processes, such as setting learning goals, controlling the products produced, managing the effort involved, interpretatiing external feedback, creating strategies to reach the goals, providing self-feedback, etc., while maintaining a high level of motivation (Nicol and MacFarlane-Dick, 2006; Zimmerman and Schunk, 1989). Self-regulated learners are...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part 1: Formative e-Assessment
• Part 2: Learning Analytics
• Part 3: Gamification
• Author Index
• Subject Index