Things to Think About
1. Assessment should never be an activity separate from the learning, for either the student or the teacher. So often, we focus on the assessment as the "closure," the end-all or be-all of a unit or activity. However, if we are doing it right, assessment should be an ongoing part of all learning. Students should always see any type of assessment as a means to grow and as a jumping off point for future learning. The problem comes when assessment becomes the finality - you pass or you fail, you got it or you didn't - with no feedback or encouragement to revisit the topic and continue the journey. As the chapter mentioned, I think that state testing has a huge impact on the way that students and teachers view assessment. Even as Fourth Graders, my students enter my room the first day of school thinking about that test in April, and worrying about what it will say. I, personally, put very little stock in state test scores. I'm with those students every day. I know where they are behind and where they excel. But, they put a lot of emphasis on it, and it isn't an assessment that is part of the learning.
2. I like to think that I used all of my assessments to improve learner performance. I tried to never leave students in the dark about something that they got wrong. For example, each week we focus on one skill (main idea, fact or opinion, sequencing, summarizing, ect.) and all of our learning activities have a focus towards that particular skill. I look over every students work, categorize which questions they are struggling with, try to figure out where the stumbling block is, and then review it with them in the next class period. I don't want to move on before they are ready, so I do my best to use every piece of data at my disposal to direct the learning. A lot of the technology mentioned in this chapter were things I already implemented in my classroom, but it did give me new ideas and I think improved my skill set in using those tools. For any project I created a rubric, but the guidelines listed in this chapter will be sure to improve them. My classroom has a set of clickers but I was guilty of using them more as an extension of traditional testing rather than using them as an engagement and formative assessment tool. I think technology can make assessments and data gathering quicker and more manageable where I as the teacher can spend more time developing the lessons my students need, and less time wading through paper assessments.
3. I always tried to emphasize in my classroom that assessments aren't scary. Assessments help us know what we are good at, and what we still need to learn and practice. I think technology can really take the edge off of that scary assessment feeling. When I started using clickers for students to take their tests, I noticed an improvement in student's attitudes towards test days. I don't know if it was just the novelty of getting to use the technology, but I believe that student attitude is an important factor in their assessments. I think that using technology as a means of assessment takes something that typically isn't fun, and make it new, exciting, and different. I think students try harder when they are engaged and even an online assessment might be more engaging than a traditional paper assessment. I don't want to say that we need to trick students into not realizing they are being assessed, but I do think that technology takes the emphasis off the assessment and puts it on the learning.
4. To be honest, most of my formal assessments last year were paper and pencil activities (worksheets and tests) that were provided through the curriculum or mandated by the school. I did on multiple occasions do projects or activities that were out of the scope of the curriculum and I developed rubrics for those activities by myself. In retrospect, I should have sought other people's advice or at least had them look at these rubrics before I used them, but I didn't. That being said, I suppose I really didn't have a process for their development. I would sit down and think about what I felt was important to see in the final project, and I would create a line item for each component. I usually had 4-5 scale items, and I would describe the performance required for each. I went against what this chapter says and I assigned points to each section of the scale (Exceptional -10, Average-8, ect.), because I still needed to put a grade in the grade book. However, when I graded I always hand wrote feedback for each section, or had an individual conference for each student to discuss their project and where they could have focused more.
5.I don't think technology has an upper hand when it comes to it's validity and reliability, just because it's technology. I can take a paper and pencil multiple choice test (which isn't a very valid assessment tool, and will likely also be unreliable) and place it into a software where students use clickers to select their answers and the assessment didn't become automatically valid or reliable just by the use of technology. However, I do believe that technology has the potential to be a more valid and reliable source of assessment data when used in certain ways, such as the e-portfolios mentioned in the chapter. I think that you can create valid and reliable assessments using technology, and you can make it without. To me, the biggest factor for assessments is the effort on the part of the teacher to create assessments that aren't just "grade-book fillers," and instead to make it a point to integrate various types of assessments, questions, and activities into the classroom.
2. I like to think that I used all of my assessments to improve learner performance. I tried to never leave students in the dark about something that they got wrong. For example, each week we focus on one skill (main idea, fact or opinion, sequencing, summarizing, ect.) and all of our learning activities have a focus towards that particular skill. I look over every students work, categorize which questions they are struggling with, try to figure out where the stumbling block is, and then review it with them in the next class period. I don't want to move on before they are ready, so I do my best to use every piece of data at my disposal to direct the learning. A lot of the technology mentioned in this chapter were things I already implemented in my classroom, but it did give me new ideas and I think improved my skill set in using those tools. For any project I created a rubric, but the guidelines listed in this chapter will be sure to improve them. My classroom has a set of clickers but I was guilty of using them more as an extension of traditional testing rather than using them as an engagement and formative assessment tool. I think technology can make assessments and data gathering quicker and more manageable where I as the teacher can spend more time developing the lessons my students need, and less time wading through paper assessments.
3. I always tried to emphasize in my classroom that assessments aren't scary. Assessments help us know what we are good at, and what we still need to learn and practice. I think technology can really take the edge off of that scary assessment feeling. When I started using clickers for students to take their tests, I noticed an improvement in student's attitudes towards test days. I don't know if it was just the novelty of getting to use the technology, but I believe that student attitude is an important factor in their assessments. I think that using technology as a means of assessment takes something that typically isn't fun, and make it new, exciting, and different. I think students try harder when they are engaged and even an online assessment might be more engaging than a traditional paper assessment. I don't want to say that we need to trick students into not realizing they are being assessed, but I do think that technology takes the emphasis off the assessment and puts it on the learning.
4. To be honest, most of my formal assessments last year were paper and pencil activities (worksheets and tests) that were provided through the curriculum or mandated by the school. I did on multiple occasions do projects or activities that were out of the scope of the curriculum and I developed rubrics for those activities by myself. In retrospect, I should have sought other people's advice or at least had them look at these rubrics before I used them, but I didn't. That being said, I suppose I really didn't have a process for their development. I would sit down and think about what I felt was important to see in the final project, and I would create a line item for each component. I usually had 4-5 scale items, and I would describe the performance required for each. I went against what this chapter says and I assigned points to each section of the scale (Exceptional -10, Average-8, ect.), because I still needed to put a grade in the grade book. However, when I graded I always hand wrote feedback for each section, or had an individual conference for each student to discuss their project and where they could have focused more.
5.I don't think technology has an upper hand when it comes to it's validity and reliability, just because it's technology. I can take a paper and pencil multiple choice test (which isn't a very valid assessment tool, and will likely also be unreliable) and place it into a software where students use clickers to select their answers and the assessment didn't become automatically valid or reliable just by the use of technology. However, I do believe that technology has the potential to be a more valid and reliable source of assessment data when used in certain ways, such as the e-portfolios mentioned in the chapter. I think that you can create valid and reliable assessments using technology, and you can make it without. To me, the biggest factor for assessments is the effort on the part of the teacher to create assessments that aren't just "grade-book fillers," and instead to make it a point to integrate various types of assessments, questions, and activities into the classroom.
Online Assessment Tool
Survey about the technology tools used during State Research Project - Click Here
Rubric for State Research Project
Rubric for State Research Project