Sunday, October 8, 2017

How to Measure Student Growth Beyond Summative Assessments

As teachers, we write engaging lessons and labs. We implement interest approaches and problem solving methods, while including guest speakers and video clips. However, how do we know if all this matters? How do we know if it is worth all the phone calls, emails, digital searches and sharing? To know how, we must realize that everything must be purposeful to help students grow their knowledge.  To ensure growth is occurring we assess.

From this week’s reading, I have learned that assessment is not just about writing multiple choice questions, creating unit projects and counting participation points. Below I have shared how we can assess students beyond the summative assessments that provide students a grade on an exam, project or course activities.

Formative Assessment:

Formative assessment is not a part of the grading process, but a part of the instructional process.  It is when students receive input and guided feedback on their relative performance to help them improve or increase their thinking.

Check out this awesome infographic I found on formative assessment! Since my school is not one to one, I am trying to implement this form of assessment through non-digital sharing. I plan to create exit tickets, moments of pair and share, and implement color cues or thumbs up and down to show understanding.  

Self-Assessment:

Self-assessment is the ability to be a realistic judge of one’s own performance.

Self-assessment can be a powerful tool to give students ownership of their own progress. To me this means that the students are able to reflect and have growth mindset. I plan to implement this form of assessment through questioning. By asking questions, it sparks higher level of thinking. Here are a few questions I had in mind to do so:

Creating- What should I do next?
Evaluating- How well did I do?
Analyzing- Where could I use this again?
Understanding- What was important about it?
Remembering- What did I do?

Peer-Assessment:

Peer-assessment allows instructors to share the evaluation of assignments with their students

I strongly believe in creating a classroom environment where students feel comfortable giving and receiving constructive criticism from their peers. I want my classroom to be an environment of respect where my students constantly work to build each other up. I also believe that this would allow opportunity for the stronger students to help coach the weaker students. 


Overall, I look forward to implementing during my student teaching experience.

Reference:

Assessing Student Learning. (September 20, 2017). Retrieved October 08, 2017, from https://www.cte.cornell.edu/teaching-ideas/assessing-student-learning/index.html

4 comments:

  1. Halee, I really like the way that you discussed each of the 3 main types of assessment. The info graphic that you found for formative assessment was great! What are some ways that you see yourself incorporating each type of assessment into your unit plan that you just created?

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    1. Thank you Tiffany. Some ways that I see myself incorporating these into my classroom is by creating exit tickets for each lesson so I can present a formative assessment at the end of each class. In addition, I have already included some questions that create higher order of thinking for self-assessment throughout lesson plans in this unit, but I want to include more so that students can think about the importance and effect of a subject matter more.

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  2. I love the infograph! I also like how you described formative assessment as involved in the instructional process. It allows students to test there knowledge, and not necessarily worry about a bad grade.

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  3. When deciding what assessment strategies to use always remember to keep the end in mind. What are the goals of a particular unit? What is the student supposed to be able to do? Thus, in agriculture education, project-based and skills assessments are what I will try to use the majority of the time.

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