Assessment of Student Learning

The following is a list of assessment ideas that you may wish to use to determine the knowledge and comprehension level of your students.

1. Once the students have surfed the web site to answer the given set of inquiry questions found on the student page, ask the students to expand on those questions to develop their own questions that relate to the context of the activity. The Guidelines for a Good Research Question will help the students develop appropriate inquiry questions. Evaluate the students based on these guidelines.
   
   
2. Using the information from Researching a Question, have the student write a report using the scientific method to answer the research questions.
   
   
3. Students can construct a portfolio of related artifacts on El Niño. Examples of artifacts can include magazine, journal or newspaper articles, information from the Internet, cartoons, stories, etc.
   
   
4. Students can design an Internet scavenger hunt of related coral reef and remote sensing web sites. When developing this scavenger hunt, make sure the students provide the appropriate URL for the site. The answers to each question should not be too embedded within a site.
   
   
5. Poster or oral presentations of the research are always good assessment tools.
   
   
6. Teachers can also assess student learning simply by observing students at work on their particular research topics. Make a checklist of what tasks you expect students to perform and check them off.
   
   
7. Prior to any assessment, be sure to give the students a rubric (preferably a scoring rubric) so they know what is expected out of them.

Student Self–Evaluation

1. Have students work in groups to share their questions with other students. Let the students evaluate each other.

2. After grading the research reports and research questions, students should write half-page reflections about each task. These reflections should address what was learned and ways to improve each task.