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

According to a survey conducted by Robert Winberg, two of every four students prefer taking traditional tests over any other grading evaluation. In fact, most schools do not use a typical grading system like most people would think. Most schools have decided to try a different method. This method assigns students a long-term assignment where they must produce a project and present it at the end of the period, to show what they have learned. Teachers may find this effective, however I do not believe this to be the best option. Despite the horrible opinions and rude sayings about tests, homework, and quizzes, I think they are more effective. I believe the traditional grading system is a more effective way for teachers to grade than an oral-presentation because it is less time consuming, better for kids with social anxiety, and it gives students time to prepare and learn.

I am a strong believer that one test defines a students. Therefore, variety is key when assessing students. When using formative assessment I use student reflections, journal entries, exit cards in addition to non verbal communication such as thumbs up or down. I also make anadotal notes on students to help assess the overall learning journey of the student. When using summative assessments, I use district assessments, state assessments, portfolios, short answer, multiple choice, and student based projects. In all forms of assessments, students are provided the appropriate accommodations. My learning goal for assessing students is to have a valid assessment that demonstrate the student’s understanding of the specific skill. It is crucial that I understand the purpose of the assessments and the content that is being taught, therefore, I often start instruction with the assessment piece in

Assessments are used to track a student’s progress while examining how much they have learned. In the English Teacher’s Companion, it discusses that all the work a student does throughout the year becomes a means of assessing what they have learned (285). In my classroom, it is crucial to examine the process of my students learning throughout the year without basing their entire grade on one final exam. As mentioned in the text, a few of the strategies that I imagine using are to give students as much information as possible. The author states “Students should understand the requirements, the standards, and the criteria” (286). With that being said,

The current academic grading system is helpful in student performance. The main reason the opposition disagrees with my point of view is simply that they believe the system has unfair limits and is not easily understood by everyone. The opposition argues that,“the grading scale is easy to manipulate because it is often subjective in nature.” (Meador) They argue this because, every teacher has a different teaching style and ways of grading. For example, during high school chemistry, my teacher required that we explain our solving process on each

Starting my journey through college again was a big decision for me. Being a single parent of two children, a homeowner, and holding a stressful, full-time job left me with little free time. However, I longed to reinvent myself and find a way to advance my career. Meeting personal goals to further my education outweighed the guilt I felt, as my children were not young any longer. I decided to make advancing my education a top priority. Discovering that when I have a goal my follow through is definite, but it is not always easy. What I overlooked as I headed down the path to fulfill my educational goal, was that stress has real health consequences.

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

I’d like to begin with rubrics, and the rubrics I currently use compared to some of the examples gleaned from my peers in the discussion boards. All of my assignments have an attached grading sheet. This outlines where points are divided among specific items such as following direction, mastery of a skill or technique, creativity (photo project) or content (essay) and presentation. Students know what is expected, however, sometimes I think that certain categories such as content, can be subjective and ambiguos. Having said that, I read several of the peer rubrics provided and found wonderful examples for ways to make that grading more specific, and less open to argument from the student. For example, the Grading Rubric for PHI-111 Research Paper, provided by Carolyn Brown in Module 5/Discussion 1, has a good breakdown of the content section of a research paper into categories including Thought, Details and

The US Dept. of Education’s testing action plan provided a set of principles for fewer and smarted assessments. Assessments must be worth taking, high quality, time-limited, fair – and supportive of fairness - in equity in educational opportunity, fully transparent to students and parents, just one of multiple measures, and tied to improved learning. Observing and assessing student achievement can be beneficial and accomplished through other measures. A rubric, or scoring tool that explicitly represents the performance expectations for an assignment reveal how students’ work compares to a standard as opposed to test scores and grades tell students where they stand in terms of number of points and convey our judgement of their work. Among other advantages, rubrics inspire better student performance. Another method to use to measure progress is a portfolio, or detailed collection of work showing how the student’s thoughts and work ethic evolve over time. Other methods to measure school performance include rates of high school graduation and dropout rates.

There is little interaction with my students for me to learn about their personal interests and goals. Also, I must incorporate decision-making for the students into my course (Green & Johnson, 2010). Typically, I create all rubrics for assignments. Rubrics are created to communicate the evaluative criteria for the assessment and empowers the students to review their own work (2010). However, in my effort to promote mastery goals, I will begin to create rubrics with my students for performance assessments. By creating rubrics as a class, the students will be able to align the assignment to their personal goals, standards, and learning goals (2010). Hence, I must initiate a dialogue in my classroom so that I learn about their personal experiences, provide learning activities that are relatable to their interests, and give students an opportunity to express themselves in the evaluative process (2010). Moreover, I must vary the products and processes evaluated to provide opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning based on their individual talents (McTighe & O’Connor, 2005). Typically, my assessments only consist of solving circuit problems, laboratory activities, and an occasional research project. Thus, I need to incorporate different types of assessment such as papers and oral check-ups for my students to encourage mastery goals (Green & Johnson,

As Winch et al. (2010) states, portfolios and checklists are valuable visual resources for parent teacher conferences, reporting, as well as overall curriculum analysis, as they demonstrate student progress, potential learning difficulties, and the individual learning styles of the students, thereby providing a fuller and more reliable representation of the students’ abilities, along with revealing their needs for further development. These forms of assessment allow for accountability, providing information for teachers to implement catered lesson plans, plan future learning activities and experiences that further develop the specific needs of the students, and apply various pedagogies to individual students’ learning styles. These portfolios and checklists are also useful in offering evidence of students’ progress throughout their school years and, as Seely Flint et al. (2014) suggest, follow through from year to year and school to school. By accumulating visual evidence throughout the year, teachers are being proactive in their summative assessments and preparing for reporting on the student’s progress and learning development. The portfolios and checklists may also be imparted to other interested parties such as parents and school authorities (Seely Flint et al., 2014), as well as other teachers in

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.

As an educator it is very important that a teacher uses different methods to teach the variety of different learning styles, and it is also important that the teacher uses a variety of assessment procedures. People don’t learn the same, and people don’t test the same either. I personally, am horrible when it comes to taking multiple choice and problem solving type assessments. I do better with essay and writing assessments, presentations, and teaching back what I have learned. With the understanding of how I can best be assessed myself, it will be important when I am the teacher that I use many methods to assess and grade my students work.

Barbara Blackburn (2017) asks the question, “Why do we grade assignments”? are we determining their progress, do we need to make a decision about how instruction is presented, why? Student evaluations should not just be about grades, but to think about the purpose of the evaluation. Once you determine why something should be graded, develop a format that best meets the purpose for the grading. For example, according to Blackburn, “if you simply want to use grades to place students into skill-based groups, you need to use some form of test or product that specifically shows you if the students understand or do not understand. Furthermore, use a variety of assessments; one size does not fit all, make sure the type of assessment