Assessing Student Learning

Describe

This week’s reading and class discussion gave us an opportunity to look further into assessments.  The premise of school is for students to come in and learn facts, skills and qualities that will allow them to go on and become successful participants in society.  Teachers work endlessly to achieve these goals and we need a way to see how we are doing.  In addition to teachers needing guidance, students, parents, and administrators need ways to see how their school is doing in their goal.  Assessment is what teachers use to do just this.  There are several different forms of assessment including norm-referenced testing, criterion-referenced testing, achievement tests, formative, and summative tests.  Different assessments are used for different purposes.  Norm-referenced testing is used to look at students test scores in relation to other students (Slavin, 2010).  A criterion-referenced test is more focused on students overall mastery of different skills, without accounting for how other students performed on the same skills (Slavin, 2010).  Achievement tests show what students know, they are closely related to standards and the content that was taught (which should keep the tests close to the standards).

Analyze

Assessment cannot simply occur, it has to be based on something.  Teachers base assessments on the standards that governments provide, which outline what students should be taught.  When preparing to teach these standards teachers write what is called objectives.  Objectives are simply what students should be able to do once the teachers has taught a certain skill, or piece of knowledge.  Objectives normally require fairly precise wording when they are written into a lesson plan.  Things like “know how the government works” or “be able to think critically” are not good objectives because there is not a measurable assessment that can gauge how well a student can do the objective.  Objectives are the other side of assessment and should be seen as equally important.  Test scores will never be as high as a school or teacher want them to be simply because what is being tested may not line up with what was taught.  There are two basic types of objectives, instructional (or teaching) and learning.  Instructional objectives are what teachers plan to teach, or what teachers plan for students to learn, learning objectives list what students should be able to do after the lesson has been taught.  As I read through this chapter it became apparent that objectives are just as important as assessment, if not more.  Objectives act as a road map for my classroom, where assessment is the destination (pardon the metaphor, I’m an ELA guy).

Reflect

Assessment to me as an educator is like candy, we need it but not too much of it.  The need for assessment in schools and our education system as a whole comes from our need for approval.  We rely on assessment to show us that we are doing good, or bad.  Assessment should be a part of making the student and the school as good as they can be.  I have personally never understood why a student spends 180 days in a class with a teacher, yet the main indicator of the student’s (and slowly the teacher’s) success comes from a test they take in one day.  Teachers should be trusted and held accountable to giving effective assessments that guide instruction.  I personally do not give a high number of assessments in the traditional sense, which are commonly referred to as summative assessments.  I like the idea of assessment in more of a formative roll, where it gives the student and the teacher a clearer viewpoint of how they are doing.  I plan on using the information in this chapter to make sure that I am writing very clear and concise objectives that will allow me to have full faith in my assessments that the material was taught and the test is an accessory to the objective.