Summary+Week+Two

=**WEEK TWO:**= ==Formative, Summative, and Alternate/Authentic Assessment == ==Sentinel Surveys: A Continuous Formative Online Assessment Methodology ==  All of us are familiar with direct assessment tools and strategies such as standardized testing, end of chapter tests, and portfolios. There is another class of assessment tools, called indirect, that include student surveys, exit questions, and curriculum and syllabus analysis. The two classes of tools compliment one another by providing information on not only student performance but aspects of course design, materials, and activities that may influence student performance.
 * Creating a High Quality Survey - Rationale**

Student surveys and exit questions have become increasingly important tools for understanding the educational needs of students. For example, we know that motivation plays an important role in student achievement, but we may not always know what motivates our students. Periodic surveys, often referred to as "sentinel surveys" allow a teacher, administrator or parent to monitor student attitudes, student/teacher/parent satisfaction with curriculum, syllabus, instructional methodology, or other issues of interest for improving student achievement and /or school improvement efforts.

Sentinel surveys may be of expanded importance in an online course since research shows that a student's attitude and/or experience and comfort with technology can have an impact on student performance in an online course. As you will see in future weeks these factors play an integral role in student success especially in online assessments.

Sentinel surveys can also be used in the place of a more formal assessment for monitoring student progress throughout a module. Similar to the notion of an exit question you can have students respond to a single exit question at the conclusion of each lesson or module, giving you a quick check on student knowledge and reasoning skills. For while in a traditional classroom you would have body language, facial expressions, etc. to check on student progress throughout a lesson in an online course you don't have the ability to collect that feedback. Sentinel surveys will provide you with periodic feedback that will allow you to modify instruction as necessary to support student achievement.

**Creating a High Quality Survey - Assignment** [|Online Surveys.docx] (11.901 Kb) Your assignment, this week, will be to create a sentinel survey that will monitor either: You may use the software of your choice in the creation of your surveys. There are many survey packages available for little or no-cost to educators. The list attached to this assignment gives you a starting point to consider for the creation of your survey, but the list is by no means inclusive of all. If you are familiar with another tool please feel free to use that tool.
 * 1) Student satisfaction with the course of study. You could consider pacing, course materials, course assignments, feedback, interaction with other course participants, etc.
 * 2) Student competency with the material. You could create a quick "check in" assessment of no more than three questions that measure the power standard(s) you were teaching that day.

Please post your survey link to the discussion board.

 **__SURVEY ASSIGNMENT__**  I have used http://www.wiggio.com before in my classes as a communication tool. One part of this tool is the survey(Poll) section. I used wiggio for driving schedules and the system would send off a reminder to all of my students 24 hours in advance to their email, or cell phones in the form of a text message. I did surveys with wiggio to gather student opinion about some classroom visitors we had. I wanted to get their opinion as to the effectiveness of the visitors topic. Wiggio is a free service and for that fact alone, it makes it appealing.I had used survey monkey in the past, but not for a long time. I decided to use it for this purpose. The only problem I had was that when I went to save the survey, for some reason the green color for the background disappeared. I like the format of survey monkey and the help feature was impressive. According to the College of Pharmacy’s Educational Assessment Committee. The Sentinel Survey system was found to be especially useful in evaluating issues related to distance learning.Study findings indicate that continuous online Sentinel Surveys are useful in rapidly assessing and reporting student learning experiences. Brief surveys and random sampling minimizes the response burden to students while allowing for educational problems to be identified quickly and corrective actions implemented swiftly. The utility of this assessment approach may have implications beyond the evaluation of learning experiences. I plan on implementing 3 Sentinel Surveys through the duration of the course. A Pre-Assessment, Mid-Assessment, and a Post-Assessment at the end of class that will ask the students to evaluate me as their instructor. With this system of assessment, I will be able to track my students progress and they will be able to see any areas they might need to improve upon. From those results, I will be able to improve upon my skills as an Online Instructor.

 **MY SENTINAL SURVEY []

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