Classroom Assessment Module
The Classroom Assessment Module (CAM) is the latest tool to be added to D3A2's offering of teacher-friendly tools.
The CAM is an installation of the Sakai open source course management system which has been customized to make it a formative assessment system to address district administrators' need to continually monitor progress toward annual school improvement goals as defined by the Ohio Improvement Process.
A comprehensive balanced assessment system includes both formative and summative assessments, that are aligned to state standards. Each component is important and should be valued for what it contributes. Depending upon the terminology being used these might be described as benchmark, common, diagnostic, interim, classroom, district, or state-wide assessments. The sections that follow use the terms benchmark assessment and classroom assessment to refer to district-authored summative assessments and teacher-authored formative assessments, respectively.
Benchmark and classroom assessments can be used to identify (1) individual students who need additional time and support for learning, (2) the teaching strategies most effective in helping students acquire the intended knowledge and skills, (3) program concerns – areas in which students generally are having difficulty achieving the intended standard – and (4) improvement goals for individual teachers and the team. Such information plays a critical role in planning how and what to teach at every level of the educational system. Each of these types of assessments should be developed and analyzed collaboratively by teams of teachers and administrators to have the greatest effect on student achievement.
Field Testing
The D3A2 CAM is currently being field tested at several locations in Ohio. If your school district is interested in field testing the CAM, please contact the D3A2 Operations Group.
Features of the CAM
The D3A2 CAM uses the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) version 2.5.6+ which has been customized to provide Ohio school districts with the complete set of tools they need to construct and administer standards-based benchmark and classroom assessments.
The Sakai CLE is an enterprise-ready collaboration and courseware management platform that provides users with a suite of learning, portfolio, library and project tools. More information about the Sakai CLE is available on the Sakai project website.
Question Banks
The Question Bank tool is the component of the CAM which allows educators to author and organize items they develop for use in benchmark and classroom assessments. The Question Bank has been custom developed for Ohio so that all test items can be aligned specifically to this state’s academic content standards.
All items in the Question Banks belong in one of three tiers:
State Question Bank: collection of released OAT, OAA, and OGT test items, as well as questions from other approved sources, made available for use by all public school districts in Ohio.
District Question Bank: collection of common assessment items created by district administrators or teams of teachers for use in benchmark and classroom assessments.
Teacher Question Bank: collections of items created by teachers for use in classroom assessments.
Additional Features of the Question Bank Tool
All items must be aligned at least to an academic content area when entered into the Question Bank tool. More detailed alignments may be made to the standard, grade band, benchmark, grade level, and indicator levels when desired.
The Question Bank tool uses the Ohio Standard Indicator Code (OSIC) framework to maintain internal alignments from questions to standards, benchmarks, and grade level indicators. This allows any future analysis of students’ results to be conducted against the standards being tested.
It also supports many types of questions, each with specific properties and uses. All question types have a text editor for entering the question and the ability to add attachments for supplemental material. They also all have the options of requiring rationale for answers and of giving a variety of feedback on multiple levels.
Tests & Quizzes
The CAM employs Sakai’s Tests & Quizzes Tool, also called SAMigo, to help educators construct benchmark and classroom assessments aligned to Ohio’s academic standards. Key features of the Tests & Quizzes tool include:
- Unlimited Assessment Types: Online tests/quizzes, homework questions, problem sets, self-study questions, compositions, projects, language drills, and surveys are all types of assessments that can be created and managed by SAMigo. Assessment Types can be preset to mitigate complexity for instructors.
- Organizing and Publishing of Assessments: Assessments can be organized into parts with questions in each part. Parts and questions can be reordered. Instructors can specify release date, due date, and/or retract date of an assessment. It supports automatic and manual grading as well as many other settings including late handling, limit to the number of submissions, anonymous grading, feedback, and high security settings.
- Questions: SAMigo supports rich-text editing of a variety of question types including Multiple Choice, Survey, Short Answer/Essay, True/False, Fill in the Blank, File Upload, and Audio Recording.
- Managing Assessment-taking: SAMigo delivers assessments to students based on a rich set of settings configured during authoring, such as randomized questions and answers, timed assessment with auto submit, high security assessments with restricted IP and secondary password, feedback settings, as well as the option to automatically send grades to Sakai's Gradebook tool.
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Question Pools:
SAMigo has a repository of questions that can be used to store and organize questions. These questions can be copied to an assessment individually or a selection can be drawn randomly from a particular question pool. - Importing/Exporting: Assessments can be exported/imported via IMS QTI xml format. QTI version 1.2 is currently supported.
A complete list of SAMigo features is available on the Sakai Project Website SAMigo Features page.
The SAMigo code base has been significantly customized in the CAM instance of Sakai to enable it to smoothly interact with Ohio’s Question Bank tool. These enhancements allow educators to search for and insert question bank items into the tests and quizzes they create. They also enforce the requirement that all test items used in the CAM—even those created in the SAMigo tool for use in specific tests—are aligned to academic standards.
Assessment Delivery
The CAM has been set up for Ohio school districts to include benchmark and classroom assessment types. Educators can use many settings available to create any number of other assessment types to suite their local needs. The reader is directed to the Sakai Project Default Assessment Types Page page for a complete description of available test settings.
Assessments are intended to be delivered online when using the CAM. Students log in using their own Ohio K-12 Network Identity Management accounts and take assessments that are assigned to them through their courses.
Assessments can be printed for pen and paper administration. However, to get the results back into the CAM, teachers must hand-enter their students’ responses.
Assessment Scoring
Educators can view, score, and save feedback regarding student responses on assessments using the Tests and Quizzes tool. Multiple choice, fill in the blank, matching, and true/false items are all scored automatically. Short answer/essay, audio recording and file upload items must be manually scored after reading each student’s responses. During scoring, teachers are presented with each test question, possible answers for multiple choice questions, possible point value, student responses, and, if required, student rationales. The CAM shows teachers links to scoring rubrics and other resources to assist with evaluating student work.
Collaboration and Learning Tools
While the CAM has been deployed expressly to fill the niche of providing affordable balanced assessment for Ohio’s school districts, it also offers Sakai’s full suite of collaboration and learning tools. The Sakai CLE’s architecture is modular and instructors can select the tools they want available for their class to create spaces for a variety of purposes. The complete list of the Sakai CLE tools for collaboration and learning is provided on the CAM Tools page.
Automatic Class Rostering
The CAM obtains class rostering data from the D3A2 data warehouse to allow automatic rostering of teachers and students into courses. D3A2 in turn obtains this information from the eSIS and DASL student information systems used in many Ohio school districts.
The result is that teachers are able to select from their current and previous lists of classes when creating course sites in the CAM instead of needing to manually enter them. Additionally, students are rostered into courses for teachers automatically when they are first created.
Districts keep their class lists current in the CAM by periodically asking their Information Technology Center to export demographics data from eSIS or DASL and submit it to the D3A2 group for loading. During the 2010-2011 school year this process of extracting and submitting district demographics data to refresh class tests in the CAM will be automated.
Identity Management
The CAM uses the Ohio K-12 Network Identity Management (IdM) System to verify users’ identities and login credentials. This is the same system that the D3A2 Data Tool uses to authenticate user logins.
The IdM simplifies the account creation and management task by allowing Information Technology Centers to locally manage all of their accounts using a single application. Customizations are being finalized in the CAM’s login code to support single sign-ons to the IdM system. Once enabled, the single sign-on will be used to log users in to the D3A2 CAM and D3A2 Data Tool simultaneously so they will not need to log in to the applications separately during a single internet session.
Integration with the D3A2 Data Tool
All student responses to tests taken using the CAM are stored in tables on the D3A2 database server. This design will facilitate the transfer of key student performance data from the CAM into the D3A2 Data Warehouse for permanent storage. It will also feed results into the D3A2 Data Tool to permit sophisticated analysis and monitoring of student progress.
As student results begin to accumulate in the CAM, reports will be developed using D3A2’s business intelligence platform to analyze schools’ progress toward their improvement goals skills attainment by student. These reports will build upon the school, teacher, and student demographics data currently being stored in the data warehouse.
Integration with the D3A2 Resource Exchange
Each item in the state question bank contains a link to the D3A2 Resource Exchange to access its narrative description and scoring guide. Additional linkages to the Resource Exchange will be built into CAM reports as they are added to the D3A2 Data Tool.