Assessment

    A lot has changed in the past decade in terms of assessing and evaluating in the classroom. When I was in school, I remember being assigned questions (usually from a textbook) and taking them up at the end of the class or the next day. I remember the teacher calling on students to call out the answer. Once someone said the right answer, we moved on. I didn’t think of it then, but looking back now, I bet there were a lot of kids that stayed quiet out of embarrassment because they still didn’t understand that method of arriving at the correct answer.

    Today, educators have come so far in how they assess and evaluate their students. Assessment is key for both the students and the teacher. Assessment is the ongoing collection of information indicating strengths, areas that need improvement, understanding, misconceptions, strategies used, questions asked, etc. Students use this feedback to help them understand exactly what they need to do to move forward and be successful.

    Assessment is also beneficial to the teacher because it is very telling in regards to the students’ abilities. There are three kinds of assessment: Assessment for learning (diagnostic); Assessment as learning (formative); Assessment of learning (summative). The terms in parentheses are there because those are the “old” terms we used when discussing assessment. I’m sure I’m not the only one who catches themselves still using them every now and then. It’s important to do an assessment for learning to determine each child’s abilities. Everyone’s abilities differ, as do their learning styles. This assessment will help you see where the class is at and what you will need to teach them. The assessment as learning is, in my opinion, the most crucial and most often used form of assessment because it is the ongoing tracking of student progress. Each time your students complete a task, you, the teacher, are always monitoring, questioning, taking notes, etc. Essentially, you are documenting what you observe. This massive collection will bring you to a firm decision when doing an assessment of learning. I can remember doing a final unit test and whatever that mark was, that was the one going on my report card. Assessment needs to be treated as a journey; you need to look at all the notes you have made while you were assessing as learning and look at the formal descriptive feedback you created mid-unit. The summative task is a nice way to bring everything together and see how the students can apply what they have learned; but everyone has off days and one single assessment can’t fairly be used as a final assessment. An evaluation is a final mark or value that looks at the student’s progress and abilities at the end of a unit. This means that in order to give a final grade, the teacher must look at the progress made throughout the unit to make an informed decision.

    I love this way of teaching and assessing but I know that if it is new to me, it’s going to be new to parents. It’s important to keep parents informed so that they do not panic when they aren’t getting marked work back all the time, or they don’t see traditional tests coming home. I created this newsletter as an assignment but I designed it so that I would actually use it in my own classroom. I think it’s written in family-friendly language so that parents have a good understanding about how their children will be assessed and evaluated in the classroom.

    While we’re talking about assessment, I thought I’d share with you my assessment tracking sheet I use when I pace the room and conference with students. This works well with pairs due to the number of boxes, which is fine because I often assess this way when the children work in pairs. Having a list of expected strategies makes it really easy to just jot down the observation as a code, rather than write everything out. Going in with an anticipated outcome makes assessing much easier! Click the picture to get a free copy!