Learning Objective Assessment

"Greasy Lake" by T.C. Boyle is a tale of one young man's quest for the "rich scent of possibility on the breeze." It was a time in a man's life when there was an almost palpable sense of destiny, as if something was about to happen, like a rite of passage that will thrust him into adulthood or cement his "badness" forever. The story opens with our narrator on a night of debauchery with his friends drinking, eating, and cruising the streets as he had done so many times in the past. What he found on that night of violence and mayhem would force him to look at himself hard. This is a story of one man's journey from boyhood to maturity.

Assessment and data driven instruction are a vital part of teaching. Assessments are used frequently to guide the proceeding lessons. I am interested in learning more about the different types of assessments and the appropriate uses of each. I think it is critical as a future teacher to have many resources to back up my techniques, especially with the growing interest in data and tracking students’ progress. Gathering information about assessments will allow me to broaden my own techniques and strategies that I use in the classroom, more specifically the ways in which I grade and provide feedback on assessments so that students can use that feedback in a positive way. In my past experiences I have noticed my cooperating teachers providing grades on all assessments with no feedback because they want the students to correct their own mistakes. This may work on summative assessments but I think that there needs to be comments on formative assessments so that students know how to correct their mistakes for the end of the unit tests.

What is the purpose of initial assessment and what kind of methods could be used? Evaluate these methods with reference to the ways they can help in the overall objective of achieving learning goals. How can you ensure learners are kept motivated and working towards these goals?

I believe assessment is important and is the basis of planning for instruction, whether it is diagnostic prior to learning, formative during units or lessons, or summative to evaluate student learning. Rowan’s quote in Every Teacher’s Guide to Assessment, "After all, in the end, the problem is less the idea of testing itself, but how we design them, apply, them, and make use of their data." definitely has an impact on my assessment practices. I feel it is necessary to make sure the student acquires all aspects of the learning. Assessment should be used to bring a value for students. Within my instruction, I implement daily formative assessments which may include turn and share, quick writes, graphic organizers, online discussion responses, KahootIt, and other forms. Designing the appropriate formative assessment to match the lesson is important to assess how the learning is taught and whether the students are showing progress. In addition, I have worked on building blocks of formative assessments in checklist style leading up to the point of reviewing for a summative test. Each of these are checked off as completed and instant feedback is given. Feedback from an assessment is essential to student learning and how a teacher will ensure the content is being acquired.

Assessment, both formative and summative, plays a significant part in the learning experience as it determines progression and enables learners to demonstrate that they have achieved their desired learning outcomes.

When teachers’ classroom assessments become an integral part of the instructional process and a central tenet in their efforts to help students learn, the benefits of assessment for both students and teachers will be boundless. The purpose of these assessments is to ascertain the student’s levels of understanding and see if there is any room for improvement and whether there are any weaknesses so as to be able to correct them. My focus is to improve my assessments to make them motivating and to enhance student learning.

Ms. R. is a 73 year-old divorced female, who has history of hypertension (HTN), coronary artery disease (CAD), hypercholesterolemia, and osteoporosis. She is on Ecotrn, Fosamax, Citracal, Crestor, Zestril. Ms. R. has been retired for more than 7 years as a factory worker. She lives with her daughter and a dog, named Abbey. Ms. R. lives an active lifestyle, e.g., she walks Abbey three times a day, walks to church for three miles on Sundays, and does work around the house. Every afternoon, she works in her garden where she grows some herbs and seasonal flowers. The vital signs taken at the time of the interview: Temperature = 98.8°F; Pulse = 78; Respiration = 12; and Blood Pressure = 110/80.

In 1741, a priest named Jonathan Edwards wrote a sermon entitled "The sinner of the hands of an angry God " in order to intimidate his followers to repent immediately, or else there would be serious consequences in the future. Edwards used a very descriptive and persuasive language to introduce fear into the hearts of those who spoke to him. Edwards in the "angel of the hands of the sinner", many people are very afraid. Jonathan Edwards delivered a speech to his followers who had the fact that they had to repent by using images, metaphor for language and repetition.

The first article that I viewed was on Edutopia and it was titled Why Formative Assessments Matter. This article was a very helpful in that it was a review of what formative assessments are, why they are used, and when and how you use them. The middle part, why they are used, it reinforces that they are used for, to inform, not to punish. This is important to remember as we are assessing and planning instruction for students each day. Learning and showing what you have learned should never feel like a punishment. At the end of the article, in the last section, there were suggestions on ways to formatively assess students in a way that would not feel as though they are being punished. Instead, they are enjoying showing what they have learned. The last tip in this article was to watch, look, and listen. It is important to remember that to formatively assess students you must constantly

It is vital in my opinion that a teacher develops a strong assessment to determine what kind of prior knowledge students will be bringing to the lesson, but most importantly to evaluate the effectiveness of the unit. A pre-assessment will give us an idea of what level the student is at when covering a certain subject, while a post assessment can give us data on whether students successfully retained the content and were able to achieve the learning goals. Using a formative assessment during the unit can also give the teacher an idea of whether students are coming along in learning the content or not, which could open up some adjustments to the lesson plan. I will use these assessments to adapt to the students learning and provide a reteach

Improved Assessment Literacy: Unlike the current education system that treats assessment more separated from teaching, the core teaching standards recognize that teachers need to have greater knowledge and skill on how to develop a number of assessments, how to balance use of formative and summative assessment as

People who suffer from severe depression feel worthless and carry feelings of guilt. Depression is a major affective disorder that can lead to dire consequences. According to Carlson (2014) people who suffer a major affective disorder such as depression run a risk of committing suicide (pp. 399-400). The symptoms of major depressive order can vary and can come in episodes or be continuous. Some of the symptoms range from uncontrollable crying to loss of appetite and trouble sleeping.

Each year as we wrote our assessments we would go through the learning objectives and make sure they were assessed. This way the assessment was fair and applied to the course. If we found it, difficult to write a question to assess a learning objective we would think again about the learning objective, and what it is we really want the students to be able to do. It made it easier to write fair, comprehensive assessments. As instructors write and review the learning objectives in a course, they can identify the level of learning that is specified in each. At an entry-level course, it is acceptable to have a number of lower level learning objectives. However, there needs to be some serious thinking done if a post-graduate course is not mainly

The use of assessments in school is always creating controversy due to the fact that many people believe that quizzes and tests do not define a student’s learning. While I agree that tests should not be the only defining factor of a student’s grade, assessments can be a valuable tool in understanding what a student has learned. Personally, I struggle with assessments because I went to a Waldorf school, which is an institution that does not believe in test taking. I believe that there are pros and cons to this approach, one of the cons being that when I reached high school I was bombarded with many multiple choice assessments. Multiple choice assessments became my enemy in high school as well as college because I wasn’t taught the test taking strategies my peers had learned and practiced. As a middle school math teacher, I quickly learned that multiple choice assessments fail to tell an accurate story about a student’s skills. My department head explained this to me by reminding me that although a student may have gotten the incorrect answer their process might have been accurate. In my classroom, their is a culture that celebrates the correct process because often times students make little mistakes, however it should not define them as not understanding a problem or concept. In other words, the process that my students take to answering a math problem matters.

For the common assessment I chose, the students were reviewing all of the topics they learned over the past week. The topics included: fractions, elapsed time, and multiplication and division. Some of the language on the summative assessment included: How many whole numbers are in the fraction and plot 5/4 on a number line. In order to do the review, students had to read the worksheet, so they had to use their literacy skills. There was content development because it was a review of what they students had learn as a result from being in my small group for that week.