Lesson 2 – Your Students and Assessments

Your Students and Assessments

Now that you’ve reflected on how your own beliefs and experiences shape your assessment practices, let’s turn to your students. Understanding how your students experience assessment—how they learn, where they are in their learning, how they prefer to demonstrate their learning, and their motivations and challenges—is essential for designing assessments that are not only effective but also equitable and engaging.

The following video explores the student perspective through the ICE Model, based on the premise that learning is developmental and iterative in nature. The ICE model (an acronym for Ideas, Connections, Extensions) helps track how students move from picking up basic ideas to making connections and then applying their learning in new ways (Fostaty Young & Wilson, 2000).

Direct link: A Student Introduction to the ICE Model
Citation: ICE Stories, Directed by Sue Fostaty Young, Ph.D., October 20, 2021

Transcript

ICE Model for Supporting Student Learning

Explore this reflection to students from a professor who engaged their students in a case study:

“When I gave you the case study to work on, it was as if I had given you a broken toaster. Some of you took that ‘toaster’ and pointed out all the pieces that were broken. And you were right, but you stopped there. A few others of you pointed out all the parts of the toaster that were broken and told me how the broken parts were affecting all the other parts. You were right, but you stopped there. Very few of you pointed out the parts that were broken, how those parts were affecting the toaster as a whole, and then told me how to fix the toaster and how to prevent it from breaking again. That’s what I wanted to see in your approach to the case study.”
(Fostaty Young et al., 2021)

The above explanation by a professor of business reflects the stages of learning represented in ICE. The categories of ICE (Ideas, Connections, and Extensions) signify a difference in the type of learning, not just the amount. In other words, as students progress through each stage, they are not doing more of the same task (listing more “broken pieces”), they are engaging in fundamentally different kinds of thinking.

ICE helps you see where students are in their learning so you can support their progress to the next stage. A student might know the facts but struggle to connect them, or they might apply their learning in creative ways while still needing help with the basics.

• Ideas: Students show they know the basic facts.
• Connections: Students link ideas together to demonstrate understanding.
• Extensions: Students apply what they have learned to new situations or create something new.

ICE can help you notice these patterns and adjust your teaching. For example, students may start their learning process with connections: what they already know that connects to foundational ideas. Or, they may start with ideas, where they learn the basic facts about a certain topic first.

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Explore more details about each aspect of ICE model and think about how you may use them in your assessments:

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