Evaluating The Key Components Of Assessing Student Learning

Assessment is a valuable tool to measure students learning and achievement. It is an essential element for teacher to reflect on what and how they teach. To assess students is to collect evidence of their learning. Teachers use the information to modify their lesson plans and adjust their instructional methods; students need feedback on their performance to concentrate on their vulnerable areas. Assessment is necessary for parents to reinforce their children strength and assist them where extra attention is required. The data collected will inform school

The goal of educational assessment is to record, evaluate and enable improved student learning. The monitoring of student work, through developing understanding of key subject concepts and their achievement of syllabus objectives requires comparison against outcomes and standards. These outcomes and standards help define the criteria which is considered essential and relevant for assessment. Through correct implementation, integration, and reliability and validity, all forms of assessment should enable improved student learning when teaching is targeted towards syllabus outcomes, objectives and through highlighting gaps in student knowledge.

As a part of the instructional process, a formative assessment is very important. It is generally incorporated into the basic practices of the classroom, and provides information that teachers can use in order to adjust the learning and teaching "in real time" (Adey, 2005; Leung, 2007; McClain & Cobb, 2001). In other words, teachers see what they need to do right away, because they are engaged in what the students are learning and how the students are responding to that learning. Because of that, formative assessments are good at helping both students and teachers stay informed about the understanding students are having regarding a particular lesson (Clarke, 2001). Because that information is provided so quickly, changes can be made if there are problems. Teachers do not have to wait until a test or other milestone indicates that there are issues with which the students are struggling, and that is very good news for the teachers and for the students who need help and support.

While my student is reading the assigned book, I will use the assessment chart above to assess the student learning. For instance, I will observe to see if my student is employing context clues to help her determining the meaning of words and phrases as they used in a text.

Evaluating student achievement through assessments is used to help teachers know exactly where students are. This practice is vital to the growth and development of a child. Good teachers have always judged and monitored their students' progress through written assessment observations, experiments, written assignments, and research projects. Assessments provide comprehensive information about students’ progress including strengths and weaknesses.

Teachers meet the needs of a diverse student population by differentiating their instruction. It is important to first develop the types of assessments a teacher will use in order to guide her instruction. Moon (2005) stated “allowing for multiple approaches to content, process, or product from an instructional standpoint also allows for multiple approaches from an assessment standpoint” (p. 232). In order for the assessments to inform instruction you have to view assessment in three ways: prior knowledge (before), tracking their learning (during), and measuring their performance (after) (Brimijoin, Marquissee & Tomlinson, 2003, p. 71).

“Tests today are not like the tests most parents took when they were in school. New forms of teaching students' work are already in use, and even more changes will be coming in the years ahead. The term "assessment" has come into common use to describe these new ways of measuring students' accomplishments.

There are multiple resources that teachers can use to expand their ideas on assessments and assessing students on their academic success, yet we are still unclear as to what are some other strategies to use when assessing our students. Alternative assessments are forms of student performance grading that allows better holistic approaches and idea to student learning and assessment. While I was conducting my research on alternative forms of assessments I was overwhelmed with how many opportunities there are and how many different options we have as teachers to assess our students and focus on their academic growth in multiple different ways. I learned a lot about providing the students with the right balance of assessments and content to help them succeed inside and outside the school grounds. By using authentic tasks that demonstrate the learner’s thinking ability and accomplish communication goal in a way students will understand and interact with. Ultimately, alternative assessments use multiple activities that reveal what students can do through emphasizing their strengths and their weaknesses. Alternative assessments are a great way for teachers to provide feedback right away and to allow the students to learn in ways that make them comfortable.

Data drives my classroom instruction. I have learned over the years that assessments comes in various forms. When I began teaching, I thought assessments meant test, right or wrong, passing or failing, pre and post. I never consider assessing students throughout the lessons, using rubrics, creating portfolios in addition to formative and summative assessments. Once I learned to assess students continuously, my teaching changed drastically. I was able to make adjustments to student’s learning immediately and mastery was reached. To begin, reliability and validity in teacher-constructed assessments is crucial in assessing student achievement. Local and state test must be reliable and valid in order to effectively measure student achievement. One way to ensure if assessments are reliable and valid is a Table of Specification. The table of specification guides my decisions based on how many days were spent teaching certain objectives which are ultimately what is assessed. According to the Table of Specification, my instruction should align in a balanced assessment with six lower level and six higher level questions. Three of my higher level questions stem from one objective in which will be included into each daily lesson making this my most heavily weighted objective. Students need a balance in instruction as well as assessments. “Linking classroom assessments to tables of specifications also guarantees consistency and thoroughness” (Guskey, 2005, p. 38). In the end, when

Educators and researchers are able to more easily distinguish patterns and direct correlations when viewing quantitative data, such as that on a test. For instance, a test given on Newton’s Laws in physics can show the passing percentages of student responses for any given item as well as for the test as a whole providing a snapshot of how many students have properly learned and understood the material that has been presented. A teacher can use this data to understand the statistical analysis of learning between specific testing items, different students, classes, as well as from year-to-year. However, quantitative assessments lack depth of understanding within the context of learning, therefore more qualitative approaches to assessing and measuring student learning are needed as well. Qualitative assessments, where an in-depth narrative is developed to help explain the context of the associated learning, can be achieved through project-oriented assessment, observations, and discussions with students, to name a few.

Assessments are integral parts of instruction, they determine whether classroom goals have been achieved, and help teachers know what areas they should focus on and maybe reteach. They are great tools for developing lesson plans and answer questions such as; “do my students possess full understanding of the material?” There are many ways of assessing students’ learning, one of which I have personal experience with are on-the-spot assessments.

There are many interventions put in place to help students succeed in learning and understanding. I looked into one particular strategy that teachers use to help students learn, which is allowing students to retake assessments. The purpose of this study is to determine whether or not there is a difference in students’ mathematics achievement in a class that is allowed to retake assessments and a class that is not allowed to retake assessments. In order to discover the information that has already been gathered on retake assessments and their impact on student learning, I conducted a literature review. In this review, I will first introduce retake assessments, followed by the history of retakes, and the benefits and drawbacks of retakes. Additionally, I will compare retakes to other remediation alternatives. Finally, I will discuss the gaps in the knowledge of retakes and their effect on student achievement.

A standout amongst the most vital drivers of student learning is the way that learning is measured and it has been demonstrated that students ' states of mind towards their studies are emphatically influenced by the nature and timing of appraisal. There are two noteworthy sorts of evaluations, subjective and objective. Subjective testing includes short-answer and fill-in-the-blank tests. Objective testing makes reference to matching, true/false and multiple choice tests. Subjective tests require students to be responsible for the answers. These tests are subjective on the grounds that they require valuation and finding from the grader. Objective tests require the student to choose particular answers gave by the test composer. These tests are objective on the grounds that the scoring in unbiased. There is no steady point of preference of one over the other. One is not characteristically better than the other. The determination of the evaluation sort to direct is dependent upon the measure of the expected learning result. Assessments are beneficial and have many advantages as well as disadvantages.

Informal assessment allows students to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways which can benefit all students. It can include group or individual projects, presentations, essays, experiments, or demonstrations. Each of these can allow for “knowledge that transfers from one situation to another [which] is based on students’ abilities to understand central principles, see connections and make distinctions, and be strategic in attacking problems and analyzing information” (Darling-Hammond, p. 285). A variety of assessment methods allow for this to happen and for students to use their personal strengths to demonstrate understanding of the information. “Research into students’ preferences for alternative assessments shows that the assessments that have been positively evaluated by students were more authentic and thus made learning more realistic and powerful” (as cited in Brown, Irving, Peterson, and Hirschfeld, 2009, p. 99). Students should be able to think creatively and take hold of their own education and learning because they must ideally be prepared for a rapidly changing society where they must be able to adapt and formulate their own solutions. Teachers are able to provide feedback to the children so they know what was done effectively and what needs to be modified. Rather than teachers pressuring students to show understanding through a single examination, they will have opportunities to confidently demonstrate knowledge with less

Part of the requirements of being a teacher is to assess students’ growth over each lesson, unit and year. During the past two week, I have had the opportunity to research different types of assessment that helped me clarify if I was using the right tools to evaluate the students. I read about diagnostic assessment that is use before a lesson to measure learning progress over the duration of a program (Assessment, 2014). Formative assessments are in-process evaluations of student learning that are typically administered multiple times during a unit (Assessment, 2014). It also gives the teacher feedback on where is the student comprehension of the material. Summative assessments are used to evaluate student learning, skill acquisition, and academic achievement at the conclusion of a defined instructional period (Assessment, 2014).