Melissa Johnson's List: Assessing

• learning occurs when students are actively engaged in making sense of phenomena as well as constructing and negotiating meanings with others (for an extensive review and analysis of this literature, see Comeaux, 2002). Thus, learning is a reflective and analytical practice as well as an intellectually transformative act. It works when it engages students in active, co-responsible ways of knowing. In this way, teaching and learning become reciprocal enterprises as teachers and learners co-exist in a communal space of shaping and transforming knowledge and understanding.
• "Students learn more effectively when expectations for learning are placed at high but attainable levels, and when these expectations are communicated clearly from the onset"
• our assessment methods and requirements probably have a greater influence on how and what learners learn than any other single factor
• the demands of assessment are even more challenging in online environments. Without consistent, timely, and relevant feedback, online students more easily interpret their classroom experience as impersonal and a hindrance to their learning.
• Interactive technologies provide us with a vast collection of resources that can enhance and extend learning environments and open up a world of possibilities in instructional design and assessment. Assessment in online constructivist learning environments should be as varied as the learning activities. In constructivist learning environments the appropriate assessments are shaped by the intended outcomes, products, or learning activities embedded in the instructional design.

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