Study On The Design Of Collaborative Assessment Activity To Improve Students' Conceptual Understanding Level

In the era of knowledge economy,conceptual understanding is particularly important for students.However,there are still some problems in how to improve students' level of conceptual understanding efficiently in higher education nowadays,such as neglecting the intrinsic relationship between concepts and knowledge in teaching contents,ignoring the conceptual understanding sharing and question discussing and neglecting learners' subjective initiative and conceptual understanding evaluation in assessment method and so on.Collaboration assessment can provide a new idea for how to improve students' conceptual understanding level,because as a kind of evaluation method,it makes learners initiatively participate in the evaluation process.As an instructional strategy,it allows students share conceptual understanding with each other and oppugn others' idea.Therefore,this study tries to use concept map to represent students' conceptual understanding,use concept map as an assessment tool to assess students' level of conceptual understanding.Then,this study tries to design a concept map-based collaboration assessment activity,so that the students become the evaluation subject and participate in the assessment process with the purpose of improving students' level of conceptual understanding.Firstly,this study made a theoretical interpretation of conceptual understanding from the two aspects which were how to visually represent conceptual understanding and how to assess conceptual understanding.Then,this study summarized the connotation of collaboration assessment activity which to improve students' level of conceptual understanding based on the theory of teaching for understanding and the essence of conceptual understanding and determined elements of collaboration assessment activity,such as activity objective,assessment method,assessment task,assessment community,interaction and assessment resources and tools.Moreover,this study constructed a collaboration assessment activity design framework around the above six elements to improve students' level of conceptual understanding.Then,took Introduction to Educational Technology course as an example,this study designed two kinds of collaboration assessment activity according to whether students joined in the process of developing assessment criteria.One was conventional collaboration assessment activity where teacher provides assessment criteria,the other was students collaboratively developing assessment criteria in collaboration assessment activity.At last,a quasi-experimental study was conducted to validate the effectiveness of the two kinds of collaborative assessment activities.Based on the above research,this study concludes that:(1)Concept map is a good tool for representing and evaluating learners' implicit ability-conceptual understanding.(2)Collaborative assessment activity that promotes students' level of conceptual understanding should focus on the following elements: activity objectives,assessment methods,assessment task,assessment community,interaction way and information and tools.(3)Collaborative assessment activity under the guidance of teaching for understanding theory improves students' level of conceptual understanding by allowing learners to share understanding and querying views with each other.Differing from the previous researches of collaborative assessment,in order to improve students' level of conceptual understanding,this study designed collaborative assessment activities from the perspective of understanding,and took the conceptual understanding level that concept map representing as the content of collaborative assessment.Complementary,the activity that we designed will provide designing cases,support tools and method references for the future teaching circumstances where supposes to improve students' level of conceptual understanding.