Standard 5

Standard 5     Assessment in a multi-racial, multicultural democracy   

  

Educators should understand that assessment is an integral part of teaching, and that children’s developmental and academic interests, accomplishments, and challenges should drive their daily instructional decisions.  They should know that various types of assessments, including self-assessment, have different uses, advantages, limitations, and biases.  They should understand that appropriate assessment must consider the cultural, familial, and community contexts from which children come.  Educators should know how to use a variety of formal and informal assessment tools and strategies to monitor and promote each student’s learning and development; use both formative and summative assessments to determine students’ understanding in each subject area; and be aware of technological tools that can facilitate assessment.

                Assessment is an integral part of teaching. That is why educators must use it in their classrooms. Assessment provides educators with data about what their students’ interests, accomplishments, and challenges are. Educators need to use this information in order to plan their lessons. What students learn from these lessons should be measurable through assessments so that educators can plan and implement future lessons that will meet the needs of every student in the classroom. It is also important for educators to realize that they need to use a variety of assessments because different ones work for different students.

As a future educator, assessment is important to me because it enables me to gain information about my students. It shows me what my students’ strengths and weaknesses are, if they understood the concept, and whether the assessment was a valuable way to test their knowledge. It is vital for me to know about different types of assessments, and which are appropriate for each of my students. The knowledge that I gain from the assessments helps me reflect on how the lesson went, and how I can plan for the next one. Additionally, assessments allow educators to track how their students are doing over a certain amount of time, and to determine if they need extra support. The authors of Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005), bring up an essential point in their text about the role of assessment in teaching. They state, 

Teachers are designers. An essential act of our profession is the crafting of curriculum and learning experiences to meet specified purposes. We are also designers of assessments to diagnose student needs to guide our teaching and to enable us, our students, and others (parents and administrators) to determine whether we have achieved our goals (p. 13). 

            During my practicum at the Runkle School in Brookline, Massachusetts, my supervising practitioner asked me to lead literacy lessons. One of the books the class and I read together was Island of the Blue Dolphins, written by Scott O’Dell. Throughout this unit, students were expected to respond to various questions in their reading journals. While I planned these lessons, I pre-read the chapters we would be reading and generated questions that I could ask my students to see what they remembered from the book.

            On the first day of this unit, I implemented a lesson about paragraphs. This lesson included how I wanted the students to set up their journal pages, with their names and the date, and the characteristics of a paragraph. I asked students to participate during this lesson by voicing what they believe a paragraph should look like. After giving them a few examples of strong paragraphs, I sent my students back to their seats to complete their reading response questions. I circulated among my students as they worked to see how they were doing and to provide help to those who needed it. Once the children had been working for about twenty-five minutes, it was time for them to go to recess. When they were at recess, I looked over their reading journals and found that many students had not followed the directions. Artifact 5A is an example of one of my student’s first reading response. He had not set up the page the way I had asked him to, and also did not write in paragraph form. Although I wanted my students to remember ideas from the book, it was also important for them to write in complete sentences in order to create a paragraph. I used the data from this assessment to help me plan my next lesson where we would review what a strong paragraph looked like and compare it to a a weak one. Through implementing this writing assessment, I was able to see what the children understood and what they needed more focused instruction on.

            It is important for educators to meet the needs of all their students. It is evident that each assessment has its advantages, limitations, and biases. Teachers need to be aware of what assessments are appropriate for each of their students, and what they can do to modify them for students if needed.. For example, at the Runkle School we use the Words their Way curriculum for grammar and spelling. This curriculum was set up in a way for students to learn how to spell according to what reading comprehension stage they were at. My students found the Words Their Way activities to be interesting and fun, and many of them excelled at the end of the week spelling tests. Although many of the students found this curriculum to be helpful, there was one child in my classroom that was on the Autism Spectrum who found this program to be especially challenging. In class when we were going over the words, it took him a long time to write them out. Because of this, he often became frustrated, stressed, and unfocused. During the quizzes, the words needed to be repeated several times and although we allotted him more time to complete the tests, he still felt overwhelmed. Through speaking with my supervising practitioner and the student’s paraprofessional, we decided as a team that the aide would give him his tests in a different classroom. We also decided that he would receive fewer words on his tests so that he wouldn’t become overwhelmed. Being able to modify the spelling test of this student helped him because he was able to focus on his words and their spelling, and in turn did better on his assessments.

            In order for an educator to truly know what assessments work for each of their students, they must know the students themselves. For my teaching reading course at Wheelock, we were assigned a student to tutor for half of the semester. On the first day we met with the child, we completed an interest inventory (Artifact 5B) that served as an informal assessment tool. The inventory included questions like: What are your favorite activities? What is your favorite animal? What do you enjoy doing during your spare time? These questions prompted the child to tell me about himself, and enabled me to learn more about the student I would be tutoring. It also gave me ideas for lessons and activities that I could include in our sessions that would promote student learning.

            To assess student learning it is important to use formative and summative assessments to determine student understanding. One way I consistently did this during my lessons was to ask questions throughout and try to involve my students’ thoughts as much as possible in the implementation of the lesson. Students would use their prior knowledge as well as information we would go over during the lesson to explain their thoughts. My math lessons always began with a headline story which would be used as a warm-up. The activity would get my students’ brains turning and would allow them to become focused before the actual lesson started. One of my lessons (Artifact 5C) aimed to teach students about different types of lines (perpendicular, parallel, and intersecting). To teach this lesson, I had many visuals readily available for student use. Students enjoyed coming up to the board when I asked them to draw different types of lines.

            Once the discussion and activity pieces were finished, they continued the lesson individually in their math workbooks. When students were finished they were expected to complete an extension. As a future educator, I believe one of the most important parts of a math lesson is the wrap-up. For this lesson, I asked students to join me on the rug to complete the activity. During this wrap-up, I had students go around in a circle saying one thing they learned from the lesson, or something they still found confusing. Next, we related the lines we learned about to lines that they see in their daily lives. Students were able to recognize that lines on a paper can be related to a desk, a football field, or even an intersection. Both formative and summative assessments were included in this math lesson which provided me with lots of feedback on how the lesson went for each of my students.

            As a prospective elementary educator, I find assessment to be one of the most important components of teaching. It is important because it allows educators to see advantages and disadvantages of certain assessments. It also shows the strengths and weaknesses of lessons and student learning. One component of assessment that I strive to learn more about is how to integrate more technology into my future classroom. I believe that technology is an asset that is now available to educators, but is not widely used. Assessments through technology can help students that find testing to be difficult due to the writing requirements. Certain programs can also help students solidify their knowledge in order to succeed during testing. I also look forward to creating more creative types of assessments that students will find enjoyable and will also help me gain knowledge about my teaching and how and what my students are learning in my classroom. 

References

Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (2005) Understanding by design (2^nd ed.) Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.