After Reflections 1 and 2 I have read a lot, besides working on different projects, individually and in groups, and these activities have generated very important ideas and strategies to be used in my final project.
According to Madaus and Kellaghan (2000), depending on the metaphor that we use to describe education, the way we think about evaluation changes radically. They propose the metaphor of “schooling as travel”, which includes the following ideas: the curriculum is a root over which students travel; each traveler will be affected differently by the journey; no effort is made to anticipate the exact nature of the effect on the traveler, but a great effort is made to plot the route so that the journey will be as rich, as fascinating, and as memorable as possible. All of these ideas were, even unconsciously, part of the distance education course on Philosophy I have developed, and which I will evaluate for validation.
Kirkpatrick’s model proposes four levels of evaluation, including: (a) reaction (satisfaction with the program); (b) learning (involving attitudes); and (c) behavior (transference to work or other situations). These variables were also thought, since the beginning, as drives for the Philosophy course I have developed, and will then also be part of the rubric to be used to evaluate it.
I decided to develop a rubric for evaluating the course, and plan to use a metarubric, as suggested by Judith Arter (in Boston, 2002).
Finally, my activities and readings also called my attention to importance of the validity and reliability of rubrics, as discussed by Moskal and Leydens (also in Boston, 2002). This will also be an issue in the development and application of the rubric.
During the next days, I will talk more about the course and how it will be validated.
References
Boston, C. (Ed.) (2002). Understanding Scoring Rubrics: A Guide for Teachers. ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. Chapter 3, “Rubrics, Scoring Guides, and Performance Criteria”, by Judith Arter; and Chapter 4, “Scoring Rubric Development: Validity and Reliability”, by Barbara Moskal and Jon Leydens.
Madaus, G. F. & Kellaghan, T. (2000). Models, metaphors, and definitions in evaluation. In D. L. Stufflebeam, G. F. Madaus, & T. Kellaghan (Eds.), Evaluation models: Viewpoints on educational and human services evaluation (2nd Ed., pp. 19-32). Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Owston, R. (2008). Models and methods for evaluation. In J.M. Spector, M.D. Merrill, J.J.G. van Merrienboer, & M.P. Driscoll (Eds.), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (3rd ed., pp. 605-617). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
