Standardized Testing Increases My Blood Pressure Up

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

Formative assessment, or assessment for learning as it is often called, is the assessment that

My personal philosophy of assessment consists of several components. The first component is that both formative and summative assessment belong in the classroom. The second component is that, although teachers should teach what is on the STAAR tests, they should try to avoid just “teaching to the test” the entire year. I also believe that different forms of assessments should be used throughout the year. Finally, I believe that assessments should always be structured in a way that is fair to the students, and addresses all learning styles. Overall, tests belong in the classroom, but should not be the focus of instruction and should be fair for all students.

“ I want my kids classrooms back” says many parents (Deutermann). School standardized testing is taking up so much time it is taking time away from students learning time in the classroom. Taking the many portions of standardized test is not benefiting the students. The point of standardized tests in schools to get measure of a student’s knowledge. Education plays a big role in the assessments. Education is the process of gaining knowledge, or different skills and attitudes. The tests are also a way to determine a teacher 's work ability. This topic is relevant to us because we are the ones that are taking the assessments, and teachers are the ones that have to help prepare the students for the standardized test.

High stakes assessments are damaging our education system because all the important decisions are being made base in one assessment and not taking under consideration other evaluations. I would like to see a change in the way students, teachers and schools are being evaluated, I want to see a balance between the decisions that is affecting students. I want our schools to teach the curriculum and not a test. I don’t want students feel pressure and stop learning because of the fear of one

From my school days I have bitter memories of going through various tests to show my daily learning in every mid and end of term test. These tests were mainly recall-based testing which made me feel that my memory was tested rather than my understanding. Furthermore the scores were very important to each student. Every student’s scores were at the entrance of the classroom, which meant that all of the students could see everyone else’s score. On the contrary I never got feedback to support our learning further. Therefore, I was not fully on board with the idea of using assessment as the foundation of learning and teaching the curriculum. Seeing ‘Assessment is for Learning’ [AifL] used in practice has shifted my views on assessments, as it was

Assessment for learning is any assessment for which the first priority in its design and practice is to serve the purpose of promoting further student learning and enabling improved student learning through purposeful interaction and providing meaningful feedback. Formative assessment is specifically intended to generate feedback and feed forward on performance to improve, accelerate and enable learning (Sadler, 1998). Formative assessment can and should occur throughout a daily class, through implementation of learning and teaching strategies that lead to both oral and written feedback. The Formative assessment approach is equitable and reliable, producing some significant indicator of student developed understanding that links directly to the syllabus outcomes. This then allows the teacher or other students to respond by trying to

Earl, L. M. (2013). Assessment as Learning: Using Classroom Assessment to Maximize Student Learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Recently, whenever I hear current teachers discussing about assessing students, ‘Formative Assessment’ is sure to be highlighted. Nowadays this method (formative assessment) is becoming popular among schools and is being applied widely in schools including my own school. Loughland and Kilpatrick (2015) identified in the few past decades, formative assessment has turned out to be the main goal for teachers and educational systems. On the foundation of Loughland and Kilpatrick (2015) findings and from my experience in the field of teaching, I found out nowadays teachers and school stakeholders strongly feel that formative assessment is the best method to assess in order to enhance students’ learning. For these evident reasons, I am interested in finding

“While high-quality formative assessments can provide teachers and students with information to aid teaching and learning, high-stakes testing

In my English Language and Comp class, we spent the majority of the year taking prose passage tests and writing essays to be graded by the standards of the test and a little of it reading novels and getting tested over the writers ability to connect with the audience or the reason they wrote this, or the plot for the books. We spent so much time preparing for the test and when we finally took the test we spent the rest of the year watching movies and decorating the ceiling tiles. It was like that for almost every one of my core classes, except for one. We would prepare all year for the test and when we finally took the test there was less teaching and more meaningless assignments and “fun days”, instead of teaching us about the important aspects of the subject of the class they would teach us how to get x amount of questions right using this technique and how to score at least a four on this essay, which is great for test scores but horrible for a student’s ability to learn. Not only do students like myself feel like this but, the majority of teachers feel that the standardized testing is ineffective and harms the student’s ability to learn (Battley-Fabre, (2011). How exactly is this form of testing meant to improve or prepare anyone for the

This article attempts to compile teachers' opinions and self-perceptions of various classroom assessment techniques. Research shows that formative assessments consistently show improvement in student learning and achievement, and that formative assessments are the most effective techniques in reducing the achievement gap between higher performing and lower performing students. This article describes how elementary and secondary teachers in Ontario, Canada perceive different assessment techniques, and how they incorporate formative assessments into their classroom (Volante & Beckett, 2011).

According to IRA standards, “the primary purpose of assessment is to improve teaching and learning” (International Reading Association, n.d.). This connotation would seem to contradict the uselessness of focused teacher-testing in today’s classroom during the major assessment phase of the school year. However, according to Johnson and Johnson (2002) and Steward (2004), they believe that assessments are useful in holding schools, states and nations, accountable throughout the educational process for student learning (as cited in Richardson, Morgan, & Fleener, 2009). As many of us educators in this district know, this accountability could be seen in our state’s profienciency exam, State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR®),

Some assessment practices that I feel are in need of more emphasis in my school is the understanding that reading is an active and complex process that understands written text (Afflerbach, 2015). Also, seeing that there is a great need for using formative assessments set off a red flag for me. At my school, we tend to focus on "beginning with the end in mind" and focus more on summative assessments instead of formative assessments. After reading Afflerbach's article, I noticed that formative assessment focus more on determining where the student is and what they need next in their instruction (Afflerbach, 2015). Upon reading the article, I've come to realize that formative assessment drives the next steps of instruction and provides the teacher the means to understand where they are coming from in order to get them to where they need to be.