Business Statistics is a credit course. This course will be taught during 15-weeks. The learning outcomes of this course describe what a student should know, understand, and be able to do at the end of this course. It is expected that students to be able to do more challenging tasks rather than memories and reproduce what has been taught. In other words, graduate students who have registered in this course will obtain skills, knowledge and attributes to conduct a research project and run the appropriate analysis using Excel. They will be able to understand and criticize articles in the professional journals; complete research projects; analyze case studies; show their abilities to think, question; and make decision based on the findings. Students are also expected to be creative, able to analyze and synthesize information, able to plan and organize tasks, able to work in a team to propose solutions to problems.
According to Fenwick and Parson (2008), “Evaluation is an integral part of learning”. It is used to ensure that students have acquired the knowledge and skills that are deemed to be essential to success in school and their life. I use criterion referenced evaluation to compare my students’ performance against a fixed set of predetermined criteria or learning standards. If students fail to meet expected learning standards, they typically receive additional instruction and academic support to help them to achieve proficiency. All learning activities and assessment activities included in this course are consistent with all the learning goals. In other words, all components are in alignment and support each other. In order to meet learning outcomes, I decided to create a complete set of assessment strategies for improving my students learning. Activities such as group research projects, Professional Development Blog, Online Discussion Forums, Analyzing Scholarly Articles, Weekly Assignments, and Quizzes will be used to help students learn more. I listed and prioritized assessment strategies to determine how much time to spend on each strategy. Then, I organized and allotted percentage for each part based on the amount of time students need to complete tasks. The purpose of evaluations in my course is to understand how well students have learned the basic statistical concepts, statistical techniques, and their application in solving real business problems. In this way, I can offer instructional feedback to my students to promote their self-awareness, and enable them to make learning adjustments and improve future work within a course. I believe that assessment procedures strongly influence student acquisition of knowledge. I use various assessment methods to measure students’ learning. One of the formal assessment strategies that I usually use to evaluate how well my students know and understand content and how well they can apply, analyze, and evaluate concepts and create new ideas is group research projects and presentation. This formative, authentic assignment (research projects and presentation) has been designed based on the “Bloom’s Taxonomy” (Knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation). It helps students to understand deeply basic statistical concepts and to obtain knowledge, skills of various statistical techniques and research process. Moreover, students will learn how to design, run a research project, analyse data using Excel, interpret, report, and present the results of a statistical analysis. To complete this assignment, students should work and support each other. Hence, they will learn how groups function productively and how to work with people with diverse backgrounds and experiences. In addition, students have an opportunity to select a research topic for their study. If some students have problem in choosing a topic for their research, I will provide a list of topics for them. Students can start to work on this assignment from the second session of statistics class and they will spend approximately 20hr [(Select a topic, 30min), (Review articles and choose an appropriate research instruments, 5hr), (Research design and collect data, 5hr), (Enter and analyse data, 3hr), (Interpret and write report, 6hr), (presentation, 30min)]. This assignment counts for 25% of the final grade. I listed and prioritized steps needed for completing this assignment. Then, I organized and allotted percentage for each part based on the importance of each step in the research process. The second formative assessment strategy is creating a Blog. Blogs are a great assessment technique for all types of personality and learning styles. Blogs offer students freedom to write reflectively about a topic without feeling inadequate. Moreover, they allow students to learn from their peers' blog content, layout and style. Students are increasingly demanding the freedom to learn anywhere, at any time, and blogs provide this flexibility. As an assessment tool, blogs can also be used to generate group discussion and assist students to become subject matter experts through a process of regular posting. In fact, the purpose of using Blog as an assessment strategy is to help students obtain knowledge and skill in statistical concepts and techniques. It can also help them to collect, organize and reflect on research material. The blog commenting feature also makes it possible for students to read and respond to each other so that they can share research successes and frustrations. Furthermore, it helps students conduct research and write a research paper. Students should contribute to the blog throughout the course. They can use it as a way of collecting research material and reflecting on the articles. It can help them keep research material organized, allow them to reflect on the research process, and foster a sense of community in the online environment. The third formative assessment strategy is Online Discussion Forums. Online discussion forums as a communication tool allow students and instructors communicate asynchronously in a virtual environment. Students can communicate with their peers at any time and wherever Internet access is available. Online discussion boards foster a sense of online community. In other words, they “build class community by promoting discussion on course topics and facilitate students learning by allowing them to view and respond to the work of others” (TeacherStream, 2009, P.2). According to Kanuka (2005), an online discussion forum gives students and teachers opportunities not only to post messages or respond to messages at any time and at any where they like and see and review the posts many times but also it enhances the participation of students who may feel inhibited when required to engage in discussions in a traditional classroom setting. online discussion forums give students time to reflect on their thoughts before contributing. They give an opportunity to students to think critically and work on their reply and check for grammar and spelling before posting (Mokoena, 2013). They help students improve their writing skills in a more informal way. Hence, this tool can be used as one of the indicators to evaluate students’ engagement and participation in online courses. The fourth formative assessment strategy that students should complete is analyzing a scholarly article. I ask students to read an article in a scholarly journal and write a critical analysis of it. This assignment demonstrates that students whether they’ve read and comprehended the article and thought critically about what it says. This assignment also helps students to understand the application of various statistical techniques, learn research process and strategies, and learn how to write a research paper. Students should read a scholarly article carefully and use the research paper evaluation form to analyse the research article. Then, they should provide a report based on their evaluation. The fifth formative assessment strategy is weekly assignments. Students should complete 10 weekly assignments about each topic which enable them to connect with the material on a more personal level. In other words, they will receive real-world problem solving assignments on nearly every major weekly topic studied in the course, instead of major project work in conjunction with only a few topics. These assignments enhance students’ creativity and problem solving skills, help students understand statistical techniques deeply, and strengthen students’ presentation and Excel skills. Also, these assignments reduce students stress and allow students to complete work steadily over the course of the semester. Moreover, they help me know my students’ ability and make stronger connections with them. The last assignment that students should complete is a series of quizzes. These quizzes evaluate students’ knowledge on a particular topic. In fact, they identify gaps in knowledge. They provide feedback to instructors and students and let them know what is learned or what is not, and what they need to know. This information motivates students to study more with more regularity and reduces procrastination.
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