Bibliographic record
Abstract
Classroom assessment, and formative assessment in particular, has garnered much attention in assessment research over the last 15 years.Specifically, this research speaks to the benefits of formative assessment in improving student learning and achievement (e.g., Shepard, 2000;Wiliam, 2007).Assessment practices have typically been researched in traditional school and classroom contexts, but as student needs evolve, there are an increasing number of students seeking educational opportunities in on-line, alternative, and outreach school environments.While research in these contexts exists (e.g., Barbour & Hill, 2011; Grossman & Kanu, 1999;Shields & Larocque, 1998), a specific focus on assessment practices in these contexts is absent.This paper reports on a study exploring summative and formative assessment practices in outreach schools in Alberta, which are described as providing "an educational alternative for junior and senior high school students who, due to individual circumstances, find that traditional school settings do not meet their needs" (Alberta Education, 2009, p. 1).Two questions guided the research: 1) What assessment practices are being utilized in outreach schools in Alberta, and 2) Do these practices reflect appropriate assessment practices as described in the research literature (see Brookhart & Nitko, 2008;Dietel, Herman, & Knuth, 1991;Nichols, Meyers, & Burling, 2009)?An online survey was administered to 85 outreach teachers across Alberta, with 66 surveys fully completed.Respondents were from both rural and urban outreach schools from 36 school divisions.The survey consisted of 21 selected response questions, with the opportunity for respondents to provide further clarification to their responses to each question.Survey questions focused on program demographics (e.g., "How many teachers are on site dedicated to your school's outreach program?," and "What is the average number of students enrolled in your school's outreach program?") and information pertaining to the process used to evaluate student progress (e.g., "In general, how are outreach student's final grades calculated in the outreach program?," and "Are students able to resubmit assignments/tests/quizzes/projects based on feedback given by the teachers?").Descriptive statistics were calculated from the selected response questions, and anecdotal information provided by the respondents was used alongside the selected response question data to provide further elaboration on the numerical data.Results from the survey indicate that the types of summative assessments used consisted mostly of assignments, tests, and final exams, with projects and other assessment tools used less frequently.Sixty-one percent of respondents indicated that in general, assignments, projects, other tests, and a final examination were used to calculate students' final grade.Twenty-two percent of respondents indicated that final grades consisted of assignments and a final exam.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".