Assessing and Evaluating Learning

This article has really brought a lot of questions into my mind that I haven’t really thought about before. I did take the education 303 class, the assessment class, but I just don’t feel like I learned that much. At the end of that class I spoke to one of my other education instructors, voicing that I felt very unprepared to assess my students and I was told that 303 is the only course we are given about assessment. I feel pretty anxious about the assessment portion of teaching.

I feel like my assessment class really focused on the validity and reliability of tests. I understand that I need to test the students based on what I have been teaching, but I do not know what the best FORMS of assessment would be for different learning goals. I can make a test. No problem. But how do I best test the knowledge of my students when I am focusing on interpretation skills or social justice understanding and how does that compare to how I would test on content or thematic understanding?

I feel like there are a lot of areas that we focus on in the Language Arts classroom. We teach reading skills, writing skills, critical thinking, cultural and historical understanding, interpretation, evidence based argument, and so much more! How in the world can I tell if my students are really getting this stuff? And even more worrying is how can I provide evidence that they are learning it?

In the article it is mentioned that instead of norm based assessment a teacher may choose to use an individual progress assessment instead. I have never seen anyone state the idea this way, but what a brilliant plan! Of course I want to asses my students based on their individual progress! What else matters? This made me think about Katie Brown and how she explained that an ELL student is required to take the state standard tests even when they are only beginning to understand English. Even if that student has individually achieved several grade levels of progress in a short amount of time the state test results will show the student as achieving below average for their grade level. Why are we testing students based on what we think they should know at a certain grade level or a certain age? This is part of the problem with implementation of the common core standards. If I have a student who has not met the standards for their grade level ever, how can I expect them to jump forward five steps and meet their grade level now? They need to start at step one in order to get to step two before we can begin to teach step five!

I also see this as a drawback to many pedagogical practices that we have discussed in this class. If we take our eleventh grade English class and focus on discussion based learning they may have never been exposed to discussion before and don’t know how to discuss. We might spend half the year trying to normalize our students to the discussion process before any great discussions can take place. If discussion were incorporated in the classroom from elementary school then we would not need to start from square one in high school.