Assessments

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Assessments
The reading of the articles on Assessment and the Routman text took my mind back over my past year as a teacher and the effective assessment process(es) I learned that fit best for my classroom. Yes, as the readings points out, there are two main types of assessments, formal and informal, and it has been my experience that if you want to be effective as an educator, you have to find a balance of both.The formal assessments, basically, the standardized test that are now administered at every grade level for grades 3 and above, are a "necessary evil" so to speak as they not only give state educational agencies data on student acheivement based on "determined" norms or standards, but also provides data on teacher, school, and district performance. They also indirectly affect fiscal outlays for districts deemed needy. At least thats how it works in theory. These test also have an impact on the curriculum, and how it is taught, we use to teach our students as some districts steer teachers to teach students the subject matter necessary to pass standardized test moreso than teaching them what is necesary to go successfully from grade to grade. As part of the balance I mentioned earlier, I used informal assessments to prepare my students for the formal ones.I used various informal assessments in my classroom to thoroughly prepare my students for all aspects of the required curriculum. I preferred the flexibility and adaptability of creating assessments that measured skills after I taught them. I was able to determine the needs of individual students and I was able to pinpoint material I needed to re-teach or teach another way. Examples of some of the informal assessment types I used were projects, group and individual, oral presentations, student teacher-student evaluator. I found that these types of assessments thoroughly prepared my students as I was able to fill in missing gaps in their educational skills as I went along and was able to get feed back from the students. I also used some of the strategies suggested from the assigned readings such as "interest inventories" and "student-class collaboration" in designing outlines for assessing a unit or subject. I am proud to say that the results from my balancing the various assessment techniques was having a high percentage of my special needs students do well on the standardized test this past year.
Posted by rmporter at 3:28 PM 0 comments