Reflection : I Am I Now?

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.

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

Educational assessment serves a valuable purpose in today’s education system. In the age of high-stakes testing, educational assessments serve to hold educators accountable for students’ progress. However, I believe that quality educational assessments serve a much greater purpose. High-quality educational assessments provide educators with the ability to make valid assumptions in regards to where a child stands in understanding a topic and what their misconceptions are in regards to the topic. This information is invaluable in determining the instructional steps the educator will take following the assessment. Educational assessments also play a role in validating what educators are teaching. What teachers choose to assess shows students what is important and valuable for them to know.

Assessment is an imperative part of the learning process. According to Stiggins and Chappuis (2012), “Assessment is, in part, the process of gathering evidence of student learning to inform instructional decisions. This process can be done well or poorly.” To learn more about assessment I sat down for a one on one interview with Jim Libretti. Coach Libretti is the head coach of the freshman football team at Paradise Valley High School. Also, he is a math teacher.

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

Teachers are teaching the student so they good test scores not to what every student needs to learn to succeed in college or even high school. Every student is a different learner and acquire different techniques to learn something. Per the article Grading teachers on test scores a teacher explains that she is not teaching the students she is trying to get better test scores to keep her job, “The real reason for the improvement was that I had betrayed my teaching to get higher scores.” Teachers went to college to teach and learn how to be a proper teacher, when they get to the teaching part they are told exactly what they need to teach so that they should not lose their job. We need to start thinking of the students and create a different way to grade how the students’ knowledge improves not just grading the

This is largely contributed to the fact that graders “don’t need experience in grading tests” (Svaldi). This means that anyone with a degree in anything can grade your high stakes test for a little extra money. Graders with no experience grading very high stakes tests creates an obvious loss of credibility in the scores attached to those tests.Another issue that arises is that many standardized test now use onestandard rubric to grade many differenttest; however, rubrics can be subjective especiallywhen “scores… [are] summed, averaged, and transformed into a grade“(Cooper and Gargan). This shows how unfair the use of rubrics isbecause they allow the interpreter of the rubric to be too opinionated or biases. It also argues that the use of rubrics should banned from writing test because they take away from

My next goal was to explore Marzano’s position on assessments. I have incorporated and valued Marzano’s research in my previous TEAM papers because he cites a significant amount of data pertaining to the direct effects on student improvement. Therefore, I next read Robert J. Marzno’s book, Classroom Assessment & Grading that Work.

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 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.

In reflection on classroom assessment, the best method to communicate my expectations on an assignment is to create a rubric. When reviewing details for an assignment, the rubric needs to be discussed with my students so that they understand the criteria for the assessment (Green & Johnson, 2010) and are able to align the criteria with clear goals for their work (McTighe & O’Connor, 2005). If students are able to evaluate their performances and products, it also removes the instructor as the sole authority on evaluations, which lends itself to the student self-assessing (Green & Johnson, 2010). In addition, rubrics can have space for comments, student goals, and action items to achieve these goals (2005). Hence, the rubric becomes a document that encourages mastery goals. Thus, to promote mastery goals in my courses, I must follow the assessment practices discussed by McTighe and O’Connor

The intent of this paper is to discuss assessment based instruction, how it has changed over the last 20 years, how it has improved instruction, and what may be the anticipated challenges using this type of instruction in future goals. In order to be able to analyze this type of instruction there is a need to define it first. The best way to define this type of instruction is to break it down so there is a clear understanding. Assessment refers to different strategies or tests that consider whether a student is learning and achieved the goals set out by the curriculum (Assessment of Learning, N.D.).

How does the grading system and learning go together? What makes learning something gradable? How can the grading system base a child 's knowledge off of a test alone? These questions and more have popped up in educators minds for years. These are the thought that have had people like Liz Mandrell, Jerry Farber and Steven Vogel rectify the grading system in their own views. Many of these authors give valid reason for understanding why student are affected by the grading system the way they are.

Introduction: I remember the first time that a grading rubric was attached to a piece of my writing. Suddenly all the joy was taken away. I was writing for a grade -- I was no longer exploring for myself. I want to get that back. Will I ever get that back? As doleful as it may sound, it is the truth. For years, students have been forced to live under a strict grading system. I am now directly speaking to those responsible for the creation of the grading system.This must change. Although many people believe in using the grading system as a way to accurately assess students based on performances, I believe that on the other hand, the grading system is exacerbating the situation because

Scoring rubrics are descriptive scoring schemes which have been developed by teachers and evaluators to guide the analysis of the products or process of the student’s efforts. Rogers and Sando (1996) pointed out the goals and objectives of Rubric Scoring System. ““Goals” are