Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
The importance of assessment in education
The importance of assessment in education
The importance of assessment in education
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: The importance of assessment in education
Philosophy of Assessment
Assessment of students is a crucial part of their education. It is one thing to be able, with some degree of confidence, to say that 'Johnny knows x' but it is quite another to be able to say 'Sarah can x'. It is clear that assessment at its core is involved in the measuring of something and that if I expect students to reach above a certain level of 'something' then I must clearly communicate that to them. The backwards design that we are familiar with goes someway towards achieving this goal. The notion that we state at the outset our expectations for student learning and then design activities to achieve that stated goal appears to be common sense. However, the tendency for teachers to rely upon pre-existing testing materials and adjust their high expectations to either teach to the test or adopt a less ?radical? approach is tempting. I think that new teachers are so overwhelmed with the day to day business of running a classroom that assessment, perhaps the most vital and under examined area in education, takes a back seat pretty quickly. A frustrating aspect of modern education is the concept of differentiation. It is often presented in the sense that each student learns differently, has different strengths and weaknesses and accordingly should be afforded assessment opportunities that allow them the best chance of success. That approach is daunting to new teachers because the intimation is that individualized assessment is preferable and with one hundred and six students of different grade levels and their own relative areas of skill, individualized assessment appears too hard a challenge.
I have begun to examine my own assessment with a view to finding ways to improve it and improve ...
... middle of paper ...
...stances students find among themselves, the absolutes are the text and the definitions available in the Oxford English Dictionary. The variable of teacher interpretation is also reduced because the student uses evidence form the text to prove their assertions. In addition to which, I contend that the explication meets the criteria for an educative assessment in that it allows for the academic growth of the student as the result of the features of the passage that are illuminated. Students see different things in the same text and express their findings differently but the value of their findings is the measure to take.
The goal of educative assessment appears to turn ?traditional? assessment on its ear. The notion that the assessment is teaching something is a challenge to many teachers, particularly teachers with a vested interest in producing test scores.
The district is now making all teachers use an assessment tool called iReady. It is a website that assesses students in math and reading. They are first tested on a kindergarten through fifth grade range to find out what they know. Then the program takes that score and determines the right level for the child and they are tested again on the level. Once all students have been assessed the program orders the students from highest to lowest and by average grade level skill they are on: early second grade, middle second grade, late second grade or any other grade. The teacher uses those scores to create her reading groups, math groups and the students she will give extra assistance to. They haven’t officially established how many times and when they will do this iReady assessment but for now they are doing it once a week for forty five minutes. The test also flags if they spent too long or too little time on a question. The ones that spent less than 15 seconds per problem are to go back and do the assessment again.
Current educational policy and practice asserts that increased standardized student testing is the key to improving student learning and is the most appropriate means for holding individual schools and teachers accountable for student learning. Instead, it has become a tool solely for summarizing what students have learned and for ranking students and schools. The problem is standardized tests cannot provide the information about student achievement that teachers and students need day-to-day. Classroom assessment can provide this kind of information.
Assessment is defined in the Merriam – Webster Dictionary as “the act of making a judgement about something” and thus connotes a worthwhile activity based on sound, careful thought. In Education, assessment has been variously defined as “any systematic method for obtaining information from tests and other sources, used to draw inferences about characteristics of people, objects or programs” (AERA, APA, & NCME, 1999, p.172); “any purported and formal action to obtain information about the competence and performance of a candidate’ (Schuwirth & van der Vleuten, 2014. p.243). Generally, assessment has three purposes. First, to determine what students do and do not know,
Curriculum and instruction is impacted by assessment, and whether in the design, delivery or data interpretation processes, aligning these apparatuses is most challenging part of being a teacher. Teachers are called to exercise an alignment between assessment and curriculum, use assessment to guide instruction, and deliver assessment that truly evaluates achievement. Two forms of assessment used in the classroom, formative and summative possess important components, that track them into purposeful, designated uses. Even more so challenging as a teacher in using these two assessments is understanding how they work separately, together, and exploring how they might be used with and for each other.
make it work? In C.A. Dwyer (Ed.), The future of assessment: Shaping teaching and learning
Regular use of formative assessment improves student learning as instruction can be adjusted based on students’ progress and teachers are able to modify instructions to cater to students’ individual needs (Black & Wiliam, 2010; Taylor-Cox, & Oberdorf, 2013). Various forms of informal and formal formative assessment methods are conducted as learning takes place, continuously through teacher observations, questioning through individual interactions, group discussions and open-ended tasks (McMillan, 2011). tests can tell us a lot about students and be used to inform and guide teaching, rather than simply to determine grades. Teachers can learn a lot from test results if they analyse the data generated to inform their teaching and learning programs (Perso, 2009). However, high stakes tests may result in students becoming stressed, leading to misreading questions, careless working and incomplete answers (Booker et al., 2010).
So what’s the big issue with traditional testing methods? They’ve been instituted for years and no one seemed to have a problem before now. Well, in the past decade, the nation’s citizens have become increasingly compassionate towards students and their individual needs. President George W. Bush has gotten generous praise for his No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 as a result of popular concerns among communities across the country. While the act may still have areas in need of improvement, it illustrates that educators, parents, and students alike have been desirous of reform within school systems. “The number of calls complaining about high-stakes exams coming from parents...are increasing, and is a reason for concern” (Report, 2001). The recent act caters to the actualization that students are different from one another, and in order for teaching and learning to take place in a non-discriminatory manner, adjustments must be made. According to the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), “Alternative assessment is any form of measuring what students know and are able to do other than traditional standardized tests. Alternative forms of assessment include portfolios that are collections of students' work over time, performance-based assessments, and other means of testing students such as open-ended essays with no single correct answer, and project work that involves collaboration with peers” (2000). Students learn in many ways. Some learn by listening to lessons and may prefer an environment with the aid of music and rhythm. Others may be visual learners who gather information by looking at photographs or watching videos. There are still others that learn kinesthetic...
I always knew that assessments were valuable to teaching, but I never understood their true value. Now, I have a better understanding on how to use assessments in my classroom to provide students with developmentally appropriate practices that are geared more towards the specific student and their needs. For instance, if I assessed a student using a task performance checklist and noticed that he had already accomplished a task, it would not be beneficial to have him keep doing the same thing that he already knows over and over. Instead, since the assessment
Assessments allow for teachers to monitor the progress and growth of his/her students, help engage students and help guide teachers as well as students in their decision making. Teachers should know that tests are not the only way to assess students in the classroom. It is important for educators constantly assess their students on comprehension and progression.Teachers can take use of both formal and informal assessments so that they can engage students in their own learning, as well as monitor their comprehension and progress.
It is important that teachers give children a fair chance to show their knowledge when assessing. “The purpose of assessment is to provide feedback that can be used to improve student performance” (Orange 2000). Teachers assess children to ensure that they are understanding the material, and to make sure they are learning. For young children, tests should never be the only criteria for assessment. Instructors should always make sure that their assessment is fair.
In spite of the importance of assessment in education, few teachers receive proper training on how to design or analyze assessments. Due to this, when teachers are not provided with suitable assessments from their textbooks or instructional resources, teachers construct their own in an unsystematic manner. They create questions and essay prompts comparable to the ones that their teachers used, and they treat them as evaluations to administer when instructional activities are completed predominantly for allocating students' grades. In order to use assessments to improve instruction and student learning, teachers need to change their approach to assessments by making sure that they create sound assessments. To ensure that their assessments are sound they need include five basic indicators that can be used as steps to follow when creating assessments. The first of these indicators and the first step a teacher must take when creating a sound assessme...
I believe that education should be looked as as a desire to acquire all possible knowledge, not as a requirement or something that can be formally examined by standardized tests. There are numerous ways that children learn and I want to be able to encourage as much learning as possible for each child. I believe that using many methods of instruction is the most effective way of teaching to these various ways of learning. These methods include group work, hands-on activities, buddy work, etc. Assessment of children should follow the same idea. When children get the chance to perform on different assessments, they can adequately show their strengths and weaknesses. I do not wish to rely on tests only to assess the students in my class. Some types of assessment that I think should be inlcuded in a classroom are journals, presentations, projects and interviews. I also think that the classroom should be run with the help of the children. By distributing jobs among the children and everyone participating in the classroom, the students will form a sense of togetherness. This will eventually create a community within the classroom. I feel that this community of learners is essential for the students to perform effectively and efficiently. They will feel comfortable in the environment and will not be afraid to take risks or ask questions. The teacher will also be a member of this community and will not be seen as unapproachable or as the only leader.
Through assessment students and teachers are able to determine the level of mastery a student has achieved with standards taught. Both formative and summative assessment should be purposeful and targeted to gain the most accurate data to drive further instruction (Ainsworth, 2010). While this syllabus does a good job of identifying the need for both formal and informal assessments, the way in which this is communicated does not provide enough detail for understanding. Simply listing assessment types does not give any insight into how these assessments fit in the learning process of this course. While some of the assessments mentioned could be common assessments chosen by the school or district to gain insight into the effectiveness of instruction, the inclusion of authentic assessments is most beneficial to students and demonstrates learning in a context closer to that of a work environment (Rovai, 2004). Unfortunately, this particular course, according to this syllabus, relies heavily on quizzes and traditional tests and essays to form the bulk of assessment opportunities. While other activities, such as formative assessments, journaling and discussions are mentioned as possible avenues for scoring, they are given a very low percentage of the overall grade. This shows that they are not valued for their ability to show progression and mastery. If this is indeed the case, this puts the students as a
Assessment is a tool used in the classroom every day. It is used to measure a student’s mastery of a skill or knowledge of a given subject. It is also what demonstrates to the teacher what the students have learned. Educators use that information to determine if they need to re-teach to a specific student, group, or the entire class. They can also use that information to determine the rate of their teaching. Assessments are important because, as teachers, we need to know what difficulties our students have and what needs to be refined for them. While I do believe in assessment and feel that it is one of the key components of teaching, I am more concerned with a child’s process of learning rather than the overall product that comes from it. This is where grades come in for me. Grades determine the students’ level of mastery on a subject, nothing more. Grades should not be the exclusive indicators that a student has learned the information that is presented to them. It is the things a student learns along the way that truly matter and sometimes cannot be measured.
As I reflect on my past assessment process, I realized how much my assessments have changed over the years. In my early years, I used tests for informational recall as my assessments. I felt these were appropriate guidelines in which I needed to follow in order to substantiate a student’s grade. Every assignment or tests was given a point value and then based on the amount of points, a grade was given. Every student’s assessment was exactly the same, and the assessments did not contain any subjectivity. I felt confident in giving the grade based on a valid point system. However reflecting back, I see that I did not include any performance-based assessments or individual learning styles in my early assessment. I also did not take into consideration the individual needs of my students. My assessment approach was awful. I am embarrassed that I use to assess students in this manner.