Evaluation

  • How will you know if this site is helping your users reach the objectives you’ve defined for them?

I will have several methods of verifying that my students have met the objectives for this unit of study.  The contributions of each group to the wiki can be evaluated on how well they meet the state standards.  They will be evaluated according to how well they organize and present their information as well as how well they meet writing standards.  I will track the contributions of individual students to their pages by using the page history feature of the wiki, as well as asking each student to describe their contributions to their page in the discussion forum (thanks for that idea, Karl).

The students will also be asked to respond to the work of different groups, answering questions about the content of the pages as well as providing feedback to other groups.  In this way, I hope to ensure that the students will read and learn from each others’ work.  I have not added instructions for this part of the wiki assignment to the wiki space yet because the response that each student will make to another group will be dependent on that group’s as yet unposted work.  I am also toying with the idea of asking each group to come up with a set of questions that another student should be able to answer as a result of studying their page instead of actually creating the questions myself.  I hope to see evidence that each student is collaborating to construct their own learning as well as learning from the work of their peers.

The final method of evaluation for this project will be a written test that I use every year.  I hope to see better results from this year’s class as a result of their collaboration on the wiki project.