How Students Are Progressing Through Learning

Getting assessments to the desirable level is therefore vital, both for teacher and students. From the Educational Assessment Landscape chart, I believe the measurements go hand-in-hand to offer students the opportunities to show what they have learned through differentiated assessments, all leading to the final result of success in summative

Assessing the children understanding is considered to be a good indicator of their learning and development process (Reys et al., 2012). Stiggins (2002) discussed the difference between the children’s assessment for learning and assessment of learning. Teachers need to be familiar with both. Assessment for learning (or as we call it the formative assessment) helps the students to learn more about different concepts and increase the opportunity to develop various skills. On the other side, assessment of learning (summative assessment) is to give the teacher an evidence of students’ achievements for purposes of accountability and reporting. For example, assessment for learning can include the teacher’s observations, in-class assignments,

Ch. 2 – Who are the various users of assessment and its results? What specific instructional decisions can be made based on assessment results? Why must we build balanced assessment systems to support the instructional programs we offer students? This chapter nails down the purpose of assessing, which is gathering information to inform teachers of students of their instruction and learning, respectively. In this way, assessment is individualized to each student and classroom, and because all students/classes are different, it should inform the teachers of what is working or not working in the classroom, which should then influence some sort of change to instruction. This chapter also talks about the different levels of assessment – from the individuals

Efficient educators know and understand the importance of selecting, planning, and implementing effective assessment tools and strategies that measure student’s levels of understanding. Different types of assessments are used for a broad range of purposes that include formative, placement, diagnostic, and summative assessments. However, the main purpose is to “foster learning in all its forms” (Lefrancois, 2013, Ch. 6.1). Teachers use pre, formative, and summative assessments to determine what students know before, during, and after instruction. Each measurement is used to plan, modify, and adjust instruction to meet the needs of all learners. Although each form of assessment plays a critical role in ensuring all students succeed, educators

With the high pressure placed on students to meet the standards of the tests, there may be outside forces that hinder the student’s ability to perform high on one of these tests. The US Department of Education argues: "Although testing may be stressful for some students, testing is a normal and expected way of assessing what students have learned” (Testing: Frequently Asked Questions). However, this type of testing has only become normal because students are expected to participate in such tests. Students have grown accustomed to routinely assessments.

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.

I realized that nowhere in my practice did I provide diagnostic assessments to help me analyze specific areas of success or struggle pertaining to learning objectives within the course. This module showed me how to identify these areas that may need additional support or enrichment. I learned how to collect and compile much more informative data on student knowledge in these areas, and how to use these measures to help improve student learning.

As a Middle School Language Arts teacher, I have found that assessments are a daily part of our job. Everything that my students do in the classroom ultimately ends up being assessed in some sort of way. I must admit that it can at times be overwhelming for assessments to be such a huge part of our curriculum; I understand the necessity of each one. I haven’t always been focused as intently on assessments. I really didn’t consider the importance of assessments as much. As I gained experience and knowledge I realized that assessing my students provides me with information that makes my job more successful. I believe to effectively teach my students, I must understand and implement the right assessments properly. My assessment philosophy is that to be able to ensure our students are learning and that we are teaching the right way we must include proper assessment for validation. With that being said it is very important to use different forms of assessments to gauge student performance. One of the outstanding features of studies of assessment in recent years has been the shift in the focus of attention, towards greater interest In the interactions between assessment and classroom learning and away from concentration on the properties of restricted forms of test which are only weakly linked to the learning experiences of students (Black 2015) This research supports the idea that assessments

Nowadays, students across America are subjected to take tests that determine whether they are liable of going to the next level. Standardized tests have become the agenda by which students’ achievements are measured. They have become the only way teachers and schools measure the achievement process of students. Because they have become the only way to rationalize students’ learning progress, teachers have begun teaching to the test (Longo 56). Standardized tests only measure students’ learning progress; it does not improve it.

Assessment, assessment, assessment, it is not fun and no student in their right mind would argue otherwise but testing is necessary. This one word has become the centerpiece of education not only in the United States but in the entire westernized world. Standardized testing has been used to measure teacher quality and student achievement since the mid-1800s. Within the last two decades standardized testing has taken on an important role in education in all 50 states since its mandate by President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. The use of standardized testing to measure progress, identify strengths and weaknesses, and help professionals reach competency in their careers are critical to improvement of the educational system. There are many facts about standardized achievement testing: the public wants it, other nations may do it better, and many critics offer no viable alternatives to it (Haladyna, 2006).

Assessments have been used in the classroom throughout the years as feedback to educators on how effective they are at teaching and how well students are learning. Since school’s decision-making is being predicated off assessment scores, they are increasingly becoming more important. “Assessment affects decisions about grades, placement, advancement, instructional needs, curriculum, and, in some cases, funding” (Edutopia, 2008, para. 1). With more and more reliance on assessments, it forces educators to take a step back and reflect on their lessons in order to ensure that all accommodations and strategies are in place to promote student success. Among those strategies, teachers must be able to “demonstrate skills at selecting, developing, applying, using, communicating, and evaluating student assessment information and student assessment practices”(Buros, 2014, pg.1). While reflecting on my own skills or competencies involving student’s assessment, I have found that my strengths lie in administering, scoring, and interpreting assessments; and choosing assessment methods appropriate for instructional decisions. On the other side, my weaknesses lie in developing valid grading procedures that incorporate assessment information. This paper will analyze these strengths and weaknesses and examine how they impact the development of assessment inside the classroom.

Standardized tests do a wonderful job of supplying the evidence needed to make norm-referenced interpretations of students' knowledge and skills in relationship to those of students nationally. The educational usefulness of those interpretations is considerable. However, the achievement is not the same as learning. When we focus on achievement, we are talking about the test scores and we could miss out on whether or not the students are actually learning.

Understand How the Students Learn: All students do not learn the same way. There are a few theorist who decided that there were certain ways students learned. Some are teacher centered and others students centered. I myself believe heavily in the behaviorist theory, because I feel that the classroom is a more controlled environment. That theory was the way that worked for me best as a student, however; I understand that times are changing, more classes are student centered. The way that I have decided to combine the two to first figure out what will best work for my students. They may learn better by constructing their own knowledge through research or working together with others to build onto what they already know. I will be sure to expose

After reading chapter 11 of our textbook, there were three important topics that stood out to me. The first topic that I thought was interesting was the purposes of assessments. According to Carjuzaa and Kellough, the purposes of assessments are for assisting student learning, identify students’ strengths and weaknesses, assess the effectiveness of a particular instruction strategy, assess and improve the effectiveness of curriculum programs, assess and improve teaching effectiveness, to provide data in order to communicate with parents and guardians and to involve them in their children’s learning, and to provide data that assist in decision making about a student’s future (Carjuzaa & Kellough, 2017, pg. 337-338). Assessing to identify strengths

The data provided can provide a comparative analysis for states, districts, schools, teachers and parents to use as a measurement of a student’s knowledge at the time of testing, which can benefit the learning and assist in using the information to identify areas of concern in the students learning. The data can be one part of the whole looking at the student and monitoring for areas of weakness and strength in the students’ academic studies. Additionally, these tests provide a system of accountability and data collection. Which applied in this framework is useful as a tool to evaluate students’ progress, identify gaps and what an intentional teacher could use to assist student education (Alber, 2017). An additional use of the standard test information, suggested by Alber (2017) is to use the information to assess how you can group students in a way to promote and guide classroom learning and teaching, optimizing differentiation in the classroom. Instead of using high-stakes standardized tests to determine effectiveness, which has the potential of educational systems being influenced to spend more time teaching to the tests, versus teaching individual students according to their need, time devoted to using the gathered data more efficiently could occur. Such a shift would minimize