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Informal Assessment Principles

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1 Understand theories, principles and applications of formal and informal assessment

Introduction
In this assignment I will briefly discuss the various types of assessment available to myself as a teacher in the lifelong learning sector, highlighting some methods of assessment and their qualities and the involvement of IT as an assessment resource and learners in the assessment process.

There are primarily four different types of assessment used whilst teaching in the lifelong learning sector, all as crucial and relevant as each other; they are Initial assessment, Diagnostic assessment, Formative assessment and Summative assessment. Each ultimately may be conducted using any method of assessment loosely categorised into four
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Performances of understanding require students to show their knowledge in an observable way. They make students’ thinking visible. “It is not enough for student ' to reshape, expand, extrapolate from, and apply their knowledge in the privacy of their own thoughts... Such an understanding would be untried, possibly fragile, and virtually impossible to assess.” (Blythe et al., 1998, p.63).
Question and answer sessions can be useful in the right environment, bearing in mind that group question and answer sessions can sometimes make the more unassertive students feel uncomfortable and may not gauge learning accurately. I would agree with this wholeheartedly from my experience using these sessions in my IT class. Similarly group discussions can have the

same pitfalls, however the use of more open and probing questioning often lends itself to a more involved debate during which vocabulary, understanding and the depth of knowledge can be assessed. Role play can also often favour the bold, though some teachers rely on it as a very useful method of assessment, in language education for example, where social interaction skills are necessary.
In my class, many of the aforementioned methods of assessment are regularly and successfully utilised. Using IT as a key resource, offers a
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