This book has guided us in coming up with ideas with our
project and has assisted us all the way into putting our project in motion. In
chapter 9, we learned how to effectively assess students. Assessment is an
important concept in any project because it illustrates comprehension and that
information can beneficial to both the teacher and the student. To begin your assessment journey you must begin by finding
methods for collecting the prior-knowledge of students.
Methods for understanding
student’s prior knowledge activity such as a K-W-L to find out how where
students are in their learning journey during the project and to measure how
close they are to learning goals. However, it’s inevitable that students will
be starting in different places and this is where the use of an “anchor” comes
into play. An anchor is established to gain a sense of where students are
starting and how far they are going to work to reach their learning goals. It
will be up to the instructor to choose an anchor or many anchors in a
differentiated classroom based on the prior-knowledge of students. I think it’s
important to keep in mind that students are starting in different places so it
would be ideal to have many different anchors instead of one that may be too
challenging for some and not challenging enough for others.
Hello Ryeasha,
ReplyDeleteThis is Jerome Burg. I discovered your mention of my name today. It's ironic that your class is reading about assessment structures as I've turned my attention towards a clear realization that traditional assessment structures are not only inadequate for some kinds of learning, but potentially harmful in the impact they have on misdirecting attention to merely the "testable" (or "detestable" depending upon one's attitude).
A very current example of the shortcoming can be seen in the Common Core Standards' splitting the reading testing into "literary reading" and "informational reading" which I happen think are both very important and very different types of reading with very different assessment needs. Traditional assessment structures have a smaller margin of error when doing informational reading because that attainment can to a greater extend be measured via multiple choice type questions.
However, to measure attainment of the benefits of literary reading is a much more difficult tasks. Traditional methods, for example, recognizing the existence of metaphor or other literary devices in a sample passage might have some accuracy in that I would have to know to look for a comparison. However, being able to do that this year when I could not know it last year is "progress," but it is not an indication that I have achieved any benefit from that progress in terms of the TRUE value that literary reading brings to one's life.
Ironically, I've been struggling with finding ways to measure not "achieved progress" but "received benefit" in relationship to my current passion, the GoogleLitTrips.com project. In attempts to maintain the vision of providing these resources without cost to teachers or students, I find myself having to generate assessment data in forms that potential funders would find attractive. But how does one quantify the actual "benefits received" that represent the real benefits of literary reading?
I might recommend to you and your course mates an interesting article I recently blogged about. I have a link to the short article AND my blogging commentary below the link here:
http://www.scoop.it/t/google-lit-trips-reading-list
The article is short, perhaps a 5 minute read as is my commentary. But, if you and your course mates are concerned with refining the assessment process to avoid the folly of, (paraphrasing Sir Ken Robinson) "valuing what can be measured instead of measuring what is valuable" I think the article might well be worth a few minutes of your time.
Happy to see importance being placed upon effective assessment in your coursework.
I'd be happy to hear your thoughts as they evolve. I'm always available at: JeromeBurg@GoogleLitTrips.com
I completely agree with you! I dont know why schools feel that the most effective way to assess students is through testing. A test can only measure a small amount of understanding, but in most cases it does not show the students understanding. I think using project-based learning would be a much more effective way to teach and assess our students.
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