ASSESSMENT OF CMCL

A.    Different understandings of ‘online assessment’

      Assessing learning that has taken place interactively and online requires, we submit, an interactive online form of assessment delivery. Teachers may indeed decide to assess the interactive quality of an individual’s performance. Yet as the performance of a group is more than the sum of its individual members’ performances, a strategy of individual assessment, if used alone, would remove the possibility of assessing the quality of an entire group’s work.        Finally, given the emphasis on ‘concerns’, we should point out for balance that online assessment also has clear advantages over its offline variety, among which are:

    A good match between delivery modes (because if teaching is online, assessment should be online too, according to current consensus);

  Easier reviewing and revision of test items owing to electronic storage and duplication facilities;

      Easier re-usability of items, also owing to electronic facilities;

      Administrative convenience;

      Availability of permanent electronic traces of learner actions.

      However, bearing in mind the CMCL community’s reluctance to adopt online assessment, unresolved issues seem to predominate. We now give them a closer scrutiny.

1.      Formative–summative and process–product assessment

2.      Process and product of collaborative learning online

3.      Process and the measurement of participation

4.      Self-, peer and tutor-led assessment

5.      Mentoring and monitoring the e-assessors

B.     Designing assignments for CMCL

      Listing the possible electronic functions that can support CMC assessment schemes, Lam and McNaught warn that ‘no one single e-learning design can employ all these possibilities’ (2006: 214). They prefer to look at different combinations of design factors, a strategy we endorse as likely to be useful to assignment designers.

      The four main features of the assessment are show in capitals. Clockwise from top left, they are:

      Formative vs. summative assessment;

      Process-based vs. product-based assessment;

      Self-, peer and tutor assessment;

      Individual and collaborative assessment.

C.    The student’s experience of CMC assessment

      The student’s experience may be approached from two perspectives: appropriacy of the experience in relation to the final result; and quality of the experience as a lived educational event.

    In the first category are included considerations of fairness, stress online, learner choice and   appropriacy of the medium.

    In the second category come questions about collaboration inducing emotions and feelings of responsibility – sometimes even of guilt – in relation to others: e g. each learner feeling responsible for the success of the group.

Reference:

Lamy, Marie-Noelle and Hampel, Regine. 2007. Online Communication in Language Learning and Teaching : Assessment of CMCL. Australia: Palgrave macmillan
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