Spotlight is published twice each semester by the Office of Assessment and Continuous Improvement in the College of Education to highlight promising practices in assessment and continuous improvement. This edition of the Spotlight examines The SPARK testing method, Understanding ACE, and Portfolium.

The SPARK (Spiraling Assessment to Reinforce Knowledge) Testing Method

By Kara Hageman, PhD

I created The SPARK (Spiraling Assessment to Reinforce Knowledge) Testing Method after observing my high school chemistry students perform well on tasks such as lab reports, practice problems, and projects and struggle on classroom tests year after year. The tendency for my colleagues to replace tests with other forms of assessment when students underperformed prompted me to enhance the testing experience in my college preparatory classes. After exhausting a variety of testing formats and designs, I used my familiarity with various learning theories to create SPARK.

SPARK is a complete redesign of the typical unit testing format. It includes a comprehensive component with a unique spiraling design. Students are tested weekly over newly learned content with low-level, knowledge-based questions. At the same time, students are tested over previously learned material with more cognitively demanding items. Throughout a semester, the tests evolve from recalling facts and concepts to making judgments and synthesizing information in different ways. The customizable design of SPARK supports research related to the testing effect, which suggests that testing is a memory-altering event superior to restudying learned material (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006b; Karpicke, 2017).

SPARK works, in part, by affording students with multiple opportunities to learn the foundational content needed to understand the material at a deeper level. Without duplicating items, the first few questions of each weekly test in an educational psychology course, for example, might pertain to the essential concepts of cognitive development before moving to items that require students to apply what they know or analyze relevant claims. As items related to a topic evolve linearly throughout the weekly format, the number of items on each weekly test increases with the addition of newly learned material. Repeating information within short periods of time rather than in a single event promotes storage in long-term memory (Brabeck et al., 2015). It also facilitates self-regulation by encouraging students to establish goals, monitor the progress of those goals, interpret feedback, and adjust goal-oriented actions. A simplified example of the spiraling format of item topics on the first four tests in an educational psychology class is shown in Figure 1 (below). In this example, two items related to newly learned material were added each week.

To use SPARK as both a learning tool and an evaluative measure, it is necessary to identify the major topics, concepts, or objectives of a course for generating items. The number of items added each week and the pace at which the cognitive level of the items advances is at the discretion of the instructor. It is important to determine the cognitive tool that will be used to classify items and generate a robust item bank for each topic and level. For instance, items from the spiraling example assessing newly learned material included lower-level questions classified as remember, according to the revised version of the cognitive process dimension of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) as shown in Figure 2.

The classification of items related to previously learned material gradually increases on the cognitive hierarchy throughout the semester. Items from previous tests or textbook publishers can be revised to align with the SPARK design. Timely feedback on each weekly test is imperative for guiding each student’s self-regulatory process. Whether they seek assistance from the instructor or form a study group, the students need to be able to use the results of each test to monitor their own learning.  

Research related to SPARK is ongoing. Studies conducted in an undergraduate educational psychology course and an 8^th grade algebra I course revealed statistically significant differences favoring the classroom of students assessed with SPARK over those assessed with unit tests (Hageman, 2020). I am currently working with a group of researchers at Georgia State University on a study involving the use of SPARK in their interdisciplinary studies program. Future research includes studying the effects of SPARK in an undergraduate statistics course at Georgia State University.    

References  

Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.). (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York, NY: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.

Brabeck, M.M., Dwyer, C.A., Geisinger, K.F., Marx, R.W., Noell, G.H., Pianta, R.C., Subotnik, R.F., & Worrell, F.C. (2015). Assessing the assessments of teacher preparation. Theory Into Practice, 55(2), 160-167.

Hageman, K. (2020). Performance of 8^th-grade algebra I students assessed with and without the SPARK testing method. (Publication No. 27959055) [Doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa]. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.

Karpicke, J. D. (2017). Retrieval-based learning: A decade of progress. In J. T. Wixted (Ed.), Cognitive psychology of memory, Vol. 2 of Learning and memory: A comprehensive reference (J. H. Byrne, Series Ed.) (pp. 487-514). Oxford: Academic Press.

Roediger, H. L, & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention, Psychological Science, 17, 249-255.