Education Assessment Philosophy
Alain Rosenberg
Assessment, in educational settings, may take many forms, such as test scores, teacher observation or informal questioning, however the ultimate meaning, purpose and/or purpose of assessment is inevitably to the instructor. Am i merely wanting for numbers to create in the grade book to appease our administrators, or am i seeking a deeper knowledge of our students', and our own, capabilities? My loyalty falls behind the latter. Whether for that benefit of our students, ourselves, our school or state, assessment needs to be directed toward the aim of gauging student learning and comprehension, yet still time, measuring our personal efficacy in obtaining that goal. In simpler terms: We grade students to ascertain not only what they know, but how successful our instructional strategies/methods are.
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Stice & Call (1987) declare that "the paramount consideration in evaluation and assessment is always to produce numbers through which children may be ranked, labeled and compared". True, each of these declared considerations have their merits; ranking for reason for scholarship and recognition, labeling to determine right options for individual instruction (e.g. gifted or exceptional), and comparison to establish an average level of student competence, but such considerations are merely part of the story. When i view it, assessment, documentation and evaluation do more than just attach classifications to students. They're tools employed to enrich our students' understanding of themselves in addition to their learning style (metacognition) and our very own pedagogy.
Assessment, when it comes to grade scores, could be both a motivating and disconcerting force. On the one hand, a good grade can greatly boost a student's self-concept and spur him/her onto repeat or surpass such success down the road. On the other, an undesirable grade can dishearten each student and diminish his/her academic spirit. At either stage, it is our responsibility as teachers to support our students with encouragement, optimism, and even more importantly, assistance. Whatever the scores received by a pupil, the grades should be accustomed to enlighten the student to both strengths and weaknesses in his/her current knowledge of a topic, and therefore clarify which goal(s) or objective(s) with the lesson should garner more attention from your learner along with the educator. Although test and homework scores are vital towards the extended learning of a student, they by themselves usually are not a way to a conclusion. Documentation of assessment is needed to add perspective to given grades.
Documenting assessment could have a compounded effect on student learning. Single grades tend to have less effect on student erudition than does an aggregated account from the student's work. Which means that rather than showing a student what he/she did correctly, or incorrectly, on a particular assessment, which shows only a short-term understanding, demonstrating the way the student has performed with time can illuminate broader inadequacies or virtues within their learning. As an example, let's imagine Johnny didn't perform well on his latest math quiz. This doesn't suggest Johnny doesn't comprehend the lesson or that the teacher didn't explain it well enough; there may be numerous external factors responsible (e.g. illness, poor nutrition, trouble in the home etc.). A single test score under such circumstances could be misleading, but, if the score is compared to the larger picture of grades obtained within a unit or semester, Johnny and the teacher will discover that he performs well with regards to understanding mathematical concepts, but has weak application skills. While assembling and documenting Johnny's scores is effective with regards to highlighting the student's progress, or lack there of, it is not enough to really gain full outlook during his needs. Without attaching intending to his records, accumulated grade totals can be worth little to him or his teacher.
The process by which we affix said meaning is called Evaluation. By use of longitudinal comparison, Johnny and his awesome teacher have identified many places looking for improvement and will henceforth take appropriate steps or make accommodations to improve Johnny's educational experience. This is actually the very essence of evaluation, and is, by this writer's opinion, the most crucial facet for the larger, more generalized term of Assessment. Only if students know very well what their grades indicate would they adequately realign their focus. This really is by no means a single way street; teachers likewise require purpose with their lesson plans and assessments. If you have a clear, well-defined explanation accompanying assessment, students and teachers alike are more likely to keep a positive attitude toward instruction, as well as a deeper plus more meaningful understanding of the topic (Lu & Suen, 1995).
Are you aware that utilization of assessment within my own professional career, my teacher education, as well as my own personal school experience, has led me to prefer the application of multiple assessment types.
As mentioned previously within this paper, single grades usually do little more than mislead students or teachers into false interpretations. Only once assessment is varied can a sufficient picture of student achievement be developed. For most students, myself included, have difficulty on large, standardized tests, but conversely, do quite nicely on localized, teacher-designed tests. This assertion is echoed by Storey (1970) while he claims that "The most valid and reliable data available to the classroom teacher is that caused by his own well-designed, item-analyzed, multiple choice tests" (. p. xiv). I really believe this is because teachers develop their examinations based on their own expectations, which are cultivated through personal expertise and interactions making use of their students. It is really an impossibility with national standardized tests.
Over a day-to-day level, I have discovered, through my practicum experiences, students find that pre-tests help you to organize important topics during on-going instruction. By informing the scholars of what I (the teacher) expect these to study on my lesson, a lot of students show increased retention on post-tests, instead of lower scores when no pre-test was given. Unfortunately, giving routine pre-tests before every lesson can in fact stifle student learning because students start to only listen for material covered around the pre-test, and enable all the other information to fall to the wayside.
To supplement pre-tests, formative assessments can be utilized (e.g. informal question-answer period and teacher observations). One type of formative assessment, as discussed by Niebur (1994), was the usage of name cards in her music class. She would choose a small sample of students to look at for the entire day, then silently meander around the room making notations regarding performance on the cards. She did this because she noticed that some students would perform below their abilities when they knew these folks were being observed. By doing this, she could make assessments without jeopardizing student functioning, and thus ask for adequate picture of the abilities. Though I'm not a music teacher, I feel this system could be useful in determining social and communication skills, along with assessment of student affect. Even though it is important to attend to insuring multiple assessments for college students, my most adamant contention concerning assessment isn't so much what kind of assessments I personally use, but alternatively, what types of questions are included in assessments.
"The average test in public areas schools classes reflects the type of lower-order thinking most students are comfy with, and measurement is nearly always created by using fill-in-the-blank, true-false, multiple choice or another 'objective' measure" (Shanker, 1990, p. 32). This is just what I hope in order to avoid. With much stressed positioned on Bloom's original and revised taxonomies, not to mention its formidable insight, Personally i think the best way to truly challenge one's students would be to implement higher-order thinking skills into both instruction and assessment. As a history teacher, I will certainly understand the importance of simple recall of facts (e.g. people, places and dates), but background and the social studies necessitate high levels of analysis because they pertain to the current status of the world. Without incorporating open-ended questions subject to interpretation, my students won't ever fully understand the value of yesteryear, which can be usually the most challenging facet of fostering appreciation for history classes.
This ties in to the yearly/semester policy for my students. As the semester progresses, I plan to slowly require deeper comprehension of the content by posing more open-ended or opinionated questions about assessments, in whatever form they could appear. Which means that at the beginning of the semester, I will concentrate on more rote memory skills yet still time gradually creating a big picture for important concepts (e.g. social development and structure, imperialism and nation building, civic participation etc). Toward the center and end of the semester, once these concepts have been adequately presented and discussed, my assessments will often lean toward deep understanding, instead of simple. Based on the documentation, I'm able to determine what content has been properly retained as well as that content comprehension which appears to be lacking.