Chapter 13

 Chapter 13: Assessing Student Learning

Before you assess your students, you must set a guide for how students will get there. It is very important to look at the standards while planning and step by step figure out how to make your students master the standards. The big picture must always be in the back of your mind as you plan your lessons week by week. As you plan you must break the objective down into three pieces: performance, condition, and criterion. Many schools have teachers place their objectives or learning goals in the classroom. The condition states how students will be assessed, the performance is generally the verb, i.e. will write, will answer 100 multiplication problems, etc. Lastly the objective states how the teacher will know that the student has successfully learned the material.

As you are planning, teachers should take into consideration all of the skills students will need in order to learn the material or complete the assignment. These objectives and lessons seem straightforward, but there are really many parts that go into the lesson.  Sometimes these skills students do not have, which means, teachers must break their lessons down into subskills. These subskills may not have anything to do with what they are learning about, for example, the first time I had students use Google Docs to write an essay. For some reason I thought students had this background knowledge, but they did not! I had to stop my lesson and give the students a lesson on how to use Google Docs. They had to know how to create a new document, how to change the font and font size, how to name the document, how to type in the document, and how to share the document.

When planning objectives, the assessment must be closely aligned. One way to prepare a unit for this is to create test questions first. I like to do this when I plan for reading. A lot of times our reading textbook we use does not follow the questions for the lessons that are in the textbook, so our team would make additional questions for the assessment or additional questions to practice throughout the week that they may find on the assessment. I found it very helpful to know what we were testing beforehand so during my lessons I could make sure to practice the types of questions the students may come across when they were being tested. 

Evaluating students is very important, no matter which type of assessment you decide to give the students. The information that this testing gives us is vital in driving instruction. If you find that your students have not mastered the material, then remediation is a must. The information also helps parents know where students are. Test scores also provide the teacher with useful information about their instructional approach. If you notice your whol class is failing, you must reevaluate your lesson and your approach. In the reading, it stated that one study found that students benefited more from specific feedback versus a letter grade. This makes so much sense to me! I like to grade my reading tests with my students one on one, this way we can discuss their errors and their thinking. They still receive a letter grade, however the immediate feedback is important to help students understand where they went wrong. 

Formative assessments show teachers what students know and where they can go to improve students’ learning. Summative assessments are generally given at the end of a unit or even course. Students should have a fair chance, this means that they should have a well rounded mixture of test types that make up their grades. Norm-referenced interpretations compare students’ scores to other students. Criterion referenced interpretations rate students based on how well they have mastered a skill. 

Tests do have a negative stigma, especially state mandated testing. Parents often do not understand why it’s important for students to be assessed. I like the idea of alternative assessments, however the question that I have is are they as affective as tests? Creating a portfolio showing a real life example of how the student has mastered the standard is great, but does is truly reflect mastery? Applying the information we teach students to real life situations is our ultimate goal. Keeping a portfolio would also show how the students have grown throughout the year. 

I liked in the text that it said that it was okay to give students a test to re-take. Students are often going through things at home and sometimes just need a second chance. I know that it is often looked down upon by administrators and should not be given consistently, however sometimes I find it necessary. Another thing I found interesting in this week’s reading was the policy on grading. Instead of giving students a 0 on missing work, students were given a 50. Having one 0 can drastically affect a student’s grade. We used this policy at my old school, or even gave students a 50 when they scored lower than a 50. I agree with the study done, that it does not inflate grades, rather it gives the students a chance not to fail or fall behind. Many students do not have the support at home or parents checking their grades constantly, so this is helpful for those students who do not have a support system at home, in my opinion.