FOUR_Assessment

Registering users and groups, gathering statistics, tests and indicators, teachers?area, comparing the collected data
Teachers and students

Mrs. Ramella has struck again. That woman has an energy that could be used to run trains. And as usual I am thrilled about this project. It was enough for her to tell me during the faculty meeting: "Come on, Binora, let?s do an online project, one of those of Officina Emilia, with the Fifth F class! You will see that these too will participate as they did last year". And lo and behold. Also this year I fell for it. In fact the results last year were truly amazing and we managed to integrate the work done with our class planning and also with the regular testing of the students' learning. This year I'll try to see how we can best use this experience to connect it with the history curriculum.

How does the assessment work? In the first place, there is an evaluation of the knowledge that students acquire during the laboratory activities and the visits. This is knowledge of technological, scientific, economic and historical nature. The assessment is measured on the basis of "before" and "after": through a sophisticated system of questions with closed answers, students respond by logging online at our activity's web page. In order to do this (us teachers must ask to do this, otherwise the Museolaboratorio proceeds in a simpler way) individual students must be "registered" before starting the activity.

I am therefore required to lead students to the computer room to prepare for the visit. I organize the kids so they can work on all computers and I get them to connect to the web address that the staff of Officina Emilia let us have for the registrations. Each student must first choose a username and password for their personal account and should also provide the code for the "group" he or she belongs to. The group for us is the class, and we're the teachers in charge, and we have told the kids the code that they need in order to register to the group, which appears on our web pages. Immediately after, they are asked some data for statistical purposes: data are therefore not private, but qualitative. Such as: age, gender, profession of parents, city or state of origin, area of the city or town of residence.

Students tend to relax and laugh together at this early stage. Luckily the registration process is very clear and straightforward and above all the questions are just a few, only about ten. So they all move quickly through this page, also because the part on evaluation tests is experienced by the kids as a kind of contest and they are in a hurry to try it out. The initial tests are simple tests of two or three types: true or false, closed questions and a few simple "games", such as tidying up some objects on the screen or indicating parts within pictures and drawings. The tests are so many that they are practically different for each student and the program still takes into account those already shown in order to avoid repeating the same test to the same person. After the test, the system returns to the student a profile of his or her knowledge as measured on a few indicators, such as: knowledge about work, about some basics of technology, about certain principles and laws of physics, about some economic variables, some historical facts and sometimes about some excerpts from literature.

In order for them to be understood by the kids, the results (as indicators) are shown with bars in a page that contains the header: "What do you know about ...." And the bars are named as: "... how to work in factories?", " ... where it is produced in Modena?" or "... why does that happen?".

For us teachers, there are some pages, also accassible via the internet, from which we can see the total result for the group and the details for each student. The result is labeled with the date, and is thus comparable to the tests that will be done after carrying out the activities. For example, when the class last year took the test again after the visit and at the end of the project, naturally they obtained better results, but what was interesting for us teachers was to observe the correlations between the results and the categories of students. For example, I recall that we were very impressed about the different results obtained on the issue of local knowledge by the kids from Modena and by the foreigners.

Also the time devoted by the students to the activities of the Officina Emilia website, both at the exhibition and from home, is recorded, and is an overall indicator of the degree of interest that we were able to stimulate. The OE staff completes, in relation to each class, an assessment of their interest and results. If we want we can ask for it and it often contains useful indications. All students and us teachers are invited to complete a quick online questionnaire, about the extent to which we enjoyed the activities. Also we are asked for suggestions, criticism and advice.

All the data that is collected by Museolaboratorio is published on the website anonymously and used to improve and change activities that are proposed.