Strengths And Weaknesses Of Assessment In Education

|assessment as a process of making judgments of learners’ knowledge, skills and competence against set criteria |

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 can be defined as the systematic gathering of information regarding the knowledge and ability of learners which enables learners to obtain feedback on the quality of their learning and enables teachers or assessors to evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching/assessment.

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.

A formative assessment provides informal feedback and information during the teaching process. This assessment measures student progress and performance thus allowing further improvement and development. It can also assess the teacher’s progress as an instructor, enabling the teacher to evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching methods.

Assessment is a valuable tool to measure students learning and achievement. It is an essential element for teacher to reflect on what and how they teach. To assess students is to collect evidence of their learning. Teachers use the information to modify their lesson plans and adjust their instructional methods; students need feedback on their performance to concentrate on their vulnerable areas. Assessment is necessary for parents to reinforce their children strength and assist them where extra attention is required. The data collected will inform school

Assessment is used to make a specific educational decision and is the process of evaluating the extent to which participants in education

Assessment is carried out to ensure that learning has taken place. This is used to measures the learner’s knowledge and skills in their chosen area of learning. Assessment can be used to encourage learners to ask questions on anything they have not understood, learners at some point will have to know that they will have to prove their knowledge and understanding to the standards of the awarding body.

Due to the ongoing nature of it, formative assessment allows me to stay more aware of student progress and any difficulty as it

Formative assessment focuses on conducting how the student learns over time. Teachers test based on understanding and comprehending of the lesson such as; chapter tests or small quizzes. This third grade teacher uses review packets, chapter tests, bonus homework sheets, individual whiteboard sheets, and whole-class discussions. For example, if a child is learning about multiplication and has to apply the concept to a word problem, but has no concept in combing the lesson to solve the problem. This informs the teacher that the child doesn’t understand the lesson or needs to go back to change how it could be taught differently. These assessments shows the teacher whether the child understand the concept they are learning or whether the teacher needs to change her teaching. Summative assessment has a different goal towards the students’ learning at the end of a unit by comparing it against some benchmark score. This assessment focuses on the curriculum aspect on assessing the whole picture meaning the unit at the end of the lesson. The practicum teacher works on providing checklists, checking problems before moving on to the next problem, using hand signals, and writing in their math journals. Students enjoy using hand signals to answer the problem and use their individual white boards to personally solve the problem. There are a few benefits of using hand signals in the classroom. Incorporating these signals provide teachers a quick visual check on whether the students understand how to solve a problem and comprehend the problem. For example; using thumbs-up, hands on your

Assessments are vital to the educational process. They provide feedback about what the students know and what they may need to learn in order to obtain the content within a given curriculum. It provides teachers with a glimpse into the student’s readiness on a particular topic or subject. One of the six key principles of having an effective differentiated classroom is having a formative assessment that informs teachers on the effectiveness of their teaching. It also provides teachers with the readiness levels of their students and shows them exactly where the students’ readiness, interests, and learning profile needs really are (Tomlinson, 2014).

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

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

Assessment is carried out to ensure that learning has taken place. It measures the learner’s knowledge and skills in their learning area. Assessment encourages learners to ask questions on anything they have not fully understood, as learners know that they will have to prove their knowledge and understanding to the standards of the awarding body.

Scriven introduced the concepts of formative assessment and summative assessment in 1967 to express the contrast in these methods of measuring progress in educational programs. The terms were first coined to address the performance of the entire educational program as a whole. Over the years, the term has been applied more directly to students and their performance. Bennett offers that defining the concept of formative assessment has gotten confused over the years. After the introduction of this term many years ago and its “reintroduction” in the United States, Bennett states that the testing industry has divided over its meaning and usage (6). He writes that one side of the coin, mainly testing professionals, believes that there should be multiple assessments given throughout a program to measure the progress of the student. These assessments would mainly happen at the very beginning to identify where the student is, somewhere in the middle of the program, and towards the end. The other side of the argument, comprised of mostly education professional, promotes “not so much a score as a qualitative insight into student understanding” (Bennett, 6). In other words, the other side has not supported multiple assessments where scores are given. Implementing formative assessment