Join CELT on Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2021 at 1 p.m. ET
Description: In this discussion, faculty members from philosophy, journalism, and physical therapy will talk about how they use authentic assessment in their teaching practice and how that can be an equity approach that helps students to challenge their assumptions. Authentic assessment requires students to apply knowledge to real world situations in innovative and concrete ways.
Panelists:
Jennifer Carter: Lecturer, Department of Philosophy and College of Business
James Pierre-Glaude: Clinical Assistant Professor, Physical Therapy Program, School of Health Technology and Management
Zachary R. Dowdy: Assistant Professor of Practice, School of Communication and Journalism
Facilitators:
Carol Hernandez: Senior Instructional Designer, CELT
Catherine Scott, Assistant Director for Faculty Development – Testing, Assessment & Evaluation, CELT
This year CELT introduced a new award, the David L. Ferguson Award for Inclusive Teaching.
The inaugural awardee is JosephM. Pierce from the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature. Dr. Pierce focuses his teaching on transparency and invites students into a conversation where they can engage critically with difficult topics. In doing so, it allows students to situate themselves in relation to an author, a body of work, a canon, or a discipline. In his Decoloniality and Queer Studies course, he challenges students to question some of the disciplinary boundaries that he learned in graduate school. Dr. Pierce stated that, “the knowledge that is taken as standard and normative has often been produced through violence and erasure, and by questioning intellectual standards, it opens up the possibility to ask questions that students haven’t had the opportunity to ask, but that brings students into a more ethical relationship with the scholarship.”
Dr. Pierce is Associate Professor of Latin American and Indigenous Studies. For his course, SPN 405 Issues in Hispanic Cultural Studies/SPN 532 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Hispanic Studies, he demonstrates all of the criteria for this award. Beyond the content, which focuses on Hispanic Visual Cultures/Decolonial Visuality in Latin America, he demonstrates a commitment to inclusive teaching and learning in his practice both inside and outside the classroom. For example, in the syllabus for this course. He is explicit in his own self-reflection on the choices he makes in the course content. He explains why he is choosing to assign readings in Spanish rather than the English translation as a way to address privilege in the academic publishing industry. He provides metrics on gender, race, and ethnicity of the authors assigned. As a way of helping students to feel ownership and a sense of belonging in the learning process, he assigns them to grade their own participation based on written expectations. His assignments include a variety of activities for students to read, annotate, write reflections, study images, and create cognitive maps. He provides an opportunity to submit one late assignment and calls it a “life happens” exception that students can opt for without needing to provide an explanation. In addition to the evidence in his syllabus, Dr. Pierce is a generous public scholar who works to inform the SB community on issues related to diversity, underrepresented populations, and white privilege in the academy.
This award was named after the late David L. Ferguson, who was a Distinguished Professor, former Chair of Technology and Society, and the founding director of Stony Brook’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. Dr. Ferguson was a leader in and out of the classroom, driven by his lifelong interest in building diversity in STEM disciplines, and in securing the federal funding to achieve that goal.
Did you attend our Inclusive Teaching Panel: Antiracist Pedagogy in Action, on Monday, February 22? If not, you can watch the recording or the recording of any of our past Inclusive Teaching panels on our Inclusive Teaching website. It was a great discussion and as our panelists shared, college is an opportune time for students, faculty, and staff to have these types of paradigm-shifting conversations!
Some other takeaways presented at the panel:
Read authors coming from a critical theory perspective
Self-reflect on positionality in relation to systems of power and privilege
Look at course design, curriculum, representation, research activities
Collaborate to design new systems at organization levels
Join us for our next CELT Panel discussion coming up on Tuesday, March 16 at noon ET: A Case Study in Organizational Change: SB School of Health Technology Management Addresses DEI.
Online assessment is an equity issue. Right now, the majority of us are doing some, if not all, of our teaching and learning online while at the same time, all of us are living through a global pandemic. But we are not all facing the same barriers. COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting people in low income groups and those who are members of racial and ethnic minorities (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020). In addition to facing an increased risk of becoming ill, and experiencing job, food, and housing insecurities, these circumstances have also exacerbated the digital divide–the gap in technology and internet access that already existed between wealthy and poor households (Ramsetty & Adams, 2020).
What does this have to do with assessment? Everything. Oftentimes we hear the word assessment, and immediately think of multiple choice exams and grades. This may lead to assuming that exams must be synchronous, proctored, timed, or otherwise “controlled” to prevent cheating and to ultimately ensure academic honesty (Hubler, 2020). However, we may not be aware that these approaches could also place extra burdens on already marginalized students. How? If a student does not have access to technology, Wi-Fi, and other resources, such as a private, dedicated workspace with a video camera and an open schedule that does not include working or caring for family members, a synchronous proctored online exam could be out of reach (if not impossible). A recent Pew Research study found that low-income parents of school-aged children expect to experience at least one of these three digital obstacles: having to complete schoolwork on a cell phone, having to use public Wi-Fi, and not having a computer in the home (Vogels, 2020).
When designing assessments, it’s important to remember that the types of controls that can be enforced in a physical setting may not be ideal for an online setting. This challenges us to think in new ways about how to conduct assessments that take into consideration not only the online environment, but also the associated factors that result in COVID-19 disparities in the lives of our students. Earlier this year, Montenegro and Jankowski (2020) discussed the need to embed equity into the assessment practice. Now that we are all living through the pandemic, this concept has taken on a greater sense of urgency.
According to Singer-Freeman, Hobbs, & Robinson (2019), “timed tests that use closed-ended questions and are completed in groups [synchronously] have the greatest potential to reveal false achievement gaps,” and fail to reflect a student’s true competence (p. 15). This points to less equity for students. However, assessments that use open-ended test questions and projects with real-world applications, such as reflective writing, ePortfolios, and research experiences, increase equity for students.
One way to bring equity into the process of designing assessments is to reframe them as a way to see how students have transformed as a result of learning what we are teaching (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010). In doing so, we open the door to more creative ways to document student progress. Furthermore, in an online environment, there are arguably an increased number of opportunities for students to show or demonstrate their newly acquired knowledge, attitudes, and skills. Students can create, present, write, problem solve, and collaborate via the tools that are already available to them through Blackboard or Google Suite.
Here are three approaches to keep in mind when designing equity-minded assessments for the online classroom.
Asynchronous. This avoids having students all try to take the same exam at the same time (Cohn & Seltzer, 2020). Is there a way to keep it open for a period of days so students are able to log in when they have the time and access to Wi-Fi or the technology they will need? Better yet, is there a way to randomize the questions or provide choices of assessment questions or types so that students are not all taking the same assessment?
Open-ended, reflective, relevant to real-world applications. This option takes into account the different challenges that students may be facing and invites them to make the course concepts relevant to their own professional or academic goals. For example, students may interview a practitioner already in the field, may create a plan for addressing a case study, or work with a partner to solve a problem or create a presentation for their peers.
Frequent, low-stakes, iterative, scaffolded. Is it possible to break up a project into a series of low-stakes chunks that students submit steadily throughout the semester? In this way, both you and your students can see their progress increase steadily rather than waiting for one or two high-stakes exams that may not reflect their true competency.
Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. Jossey-Bass.
Ramsetty, A., & Adams, C. (2020). Impact of the digital divide in the age of COVID-19. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 27(7), 1147-1148.
Singer‐Freeman, K., Hobbs, H., & Robinson, C. (2019). Theoretical matrix of culturally relevant assessment. Assessment Update, 31(4), 1-16.
