Effective Assessment – “Young Bits” – Chapter 5

Learning outcomes assessment is a critical part of any educational process since its results are the one to determine whether or not the goals of education are being met. Also, assessments play an essential role in the learning process and motivation of the students by determining what they know, what they need to know, what they have learned, planning their learning process, and gauging their progress.

Given the importance of this process, it’s essential to get useful assessment data, that will properly evaluate your assessment objectives, but without creating an overwhelming burden for the learners, so here are some information and tools that will help you in this process. 

• • Guide for Effective Assessment – here you will find theoretical information about the characteristics of effective assessment, how an effective assessment can support youth workers in the educational process, tools and methods that you can use, and how to use them in order to ensure their effectiveness.
  • Assessment and Feedback – This page is designed to introduce you to the principles behind effective assessment and feedback and how to apply them to your practice. Exploring the sections you will find useful information about the qualities of good assessment, assessment methods, what is good feedback and assessment design. The information is mainly focused on formal education but it’s valid also for non-formal and informal contexts of learning.
  • Educational evaluation in Youth Work – Here you can find theoretical and practical tools to work with and use when evaluating young people’s learning process. The T-Kits want and succeed (in our opinion) to show you that “evaluation can be thrilling, electrifying, stimulating, fun, exciting… or at least attractive and inspiring enough to integrate it into your educational work”.
  • Best practices in Creating Effective Assessments – An article that is focused, as well, on formal education but with very useful information that will help you design more effective assessments in any field of learning.

Digital Tools you can use for Effective Assessment:

• • Kahoot – a game-based learning platform, used as educational technology in schools and other educational institutions. Its learning games, “kahoots”, are user-generated multiple-choice quizzes that can be used to review students’ knowledge, for formative assessment, or as a break from traditional classroom activities.
  • Quizlet – a platform used for studying and learning offering products like digital flashcards, matching games, practice electronic assessments, and live quizzes. 
  • Mentimeter – is an application that enables users to share knowledge and real-time feedback on mobile with presentations, polls or brainstorming sessions in classes, meetings, gatherings, conferences and other group activities. The app also focuses on online collaboration for the education sector allowing students or public members to answer questions anonymously.
  • Socrative – a quiz-based, formative assessment tool with multiple features that can enrich teaching and learning. Youth workers can design quizzes, space races, exit tickets, and more, to collect and analyze student data in real-time to make on-the-spot changes and improve student learning.
  • Plickers – an assessment tool made by a teacher who was looking for a quick and simple way to check student understanding. This assessment tool allows teachers to collect on-the-spot formative assessment data without the need to have students use devices or paper and pencil.
  • Google Forms – a survey administration software included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google. The app allows users to create and edit surveys online while collaborating with other users in real-time. The collected information can be automatically entered into a spreadsheet.
  • Wooflash – an educational platform that allows you to create interactive and personalised presentations for your students and yourself (since students can also create their own content). You can choose from a wide range of questions, including quizzes, flashcards, fill-in-the-blanks, labels on images, matchings, sortings and more to create your course and share it with your students. 
  • Nearpod – Nearpod is a kind of technology-integrated learning environment that allows youth workers to create presentations, interactive activities and assessments, organized in lessons. It supports a wide number of formats e.g. text, power points, PDFs, pictures, and videos, including also some form of virtual reality (VR) lessons.

Keep learning fun! See you next week!

The content for this post is part of our online campaign called “Young Bits” which aims to increase the quality of Digital Youth Work by providing the interested parties with knowledge and tools that exist on the internet, but are not structured in a handy manner. The campaign represents the main result of the project „DIgital Technology as a TOol”, a training course that was financed with the support of the European Commission through Erasmus+ Programme. This blog reflects only the author’s views, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.