PLE #4: Assessment

If I have learned anything from my time in the education program, it is that "assessment" does not necessarily equal "testing". Assessments come in all different forms and can serve many different purposes. They don't necessarily need to have a grade attached in order to provide necessary information about student learning. In fact, some of the best assessments can be short, informal, and non-graded. Assessments can be used to inform instruction, monitor student progress, and demonstrate student learning. High-stakes assessments, such as standardized tests, can be used to make important decisions about students and to hold teachers and administrators accountable for student learning. I don't think that any teacher would deny that assessment is incredibly important in the classroom, but there is certainly a lot of controversy surrounding the use of high-stakes assessments (and the misuse of assessment in general). I think that creating and using assessments is going to be something that we all struggle with as first year teachers, but our study of assessments in this class has definitely helped me out a lot.

Click here to read an article from Vanderbilt University about classroom assessment techniques. I also found this article on different types of assessments that can be used to check for understanding.

I'm currently observing in a second grade classroom, and they're studying solid shapes in math. This involves learning about faces, edges, and vertices as well as the different types of solid shapes (cubes, spheres, cones, etc.). I've noticed that this is a challenging concept for some students to grasp, and I think that assessing students often would ensure that I knew whether or not they were understanding the material.

In my lesson plan, I would use short, daily homework assignments as a form of informal, formative assessment. Students would answer about 5 questions to make sure that they understood the differences between faces, edges, and vertices as well as the differences between the solid shapes. For example, I might have students tell me everything that they know about a particular shape or tell me the name of the shape based off of its faces and vertices. A fun performance-based assessment would involve students working in pairs or groups of three to create solid shapes out of construction paper. Each group would be given a shape and would have to use their knowledge of edges, faces, and vertices to build their shape. A more formal assessment for this lesson plan might involve giving students a short quiz after we had discussed solid shapes for a few days. I might also show my kids this video before giving them their quiz so that they would have a fun, musical reminder of what they've learned.



Finally, I would give a graded topic test as a means of summative assessment. I would hold off on giving this final topic test until I felt like a majority of my class had mastered the topic taught in my lesson plan.