In many classrooms, assessment helps teachers develop detailed understandings of their students as information processors-readers seen through the lens of strategy and skill assessments.
In addition to building relationships, affective domain assessment will help us understand our students and how we can best motivate and assist them in learning.
Taking Jesse's high-stakes test scores and the detailed documentation of his growth related to motivation, self-concept, attitude, and attributions, Nan develops an explanation of her success in teaching reading-success through attention to both affective and cognitive student growth.
It is important that we keep assessment evidence such as this so that, when needed, we can prove what is truly affecting a learner's growth.
When viewed from the perspective of Pellegrino and colleagues' (2001) model of assessment, current reading assessment practice privileges cognition, largely ignoring affective and conative development, and therefore does not account for student development relative to the full construct of reading development.
Glad they figured this out. How can we help our ensure this doesn't happen to our students?
We have always admired teachers with reputations like that, for whom grades are not just final marks on a report card but more indicative of a process of teaching, learning, assessing, and communicating.
This cannot be stressed enough. How can we help transform the education system so grades reflect learning and student effort?
Finally, letter grades may actually undermine some teaching strategies, such as cooperative learning or writer's workshop, in which the emphases are less on product and more on process and less on individual accomplishment and more on achievement of the group, shared learning, and confidence building.
I experienced this in high school and the grading, which felt that it was typically just based on getting the "right answer" rather than portraying your understanding as a learner, was frustrating. I wonder how as teachers we can improve upon this.
A review of 46 studies investigating the effects of high-stakes tests in four areas (student achievement, graduation, post-secondary outcomes, and school response) revealed that exit tests have not produced expected benefits and have had negative effects for the most disadvantaged students (Holme, Richards, Jimerson, & Cohen, 2010).
In order to change this (as it clearly needs to be changed), what can we propose to do in place of standardized testing to give our district/state/country an understanding of our students' learning?
Tests (and the curricula they are designed to assess) are generally devised by members of the dominant culture and may be inadequate for evaluating the knowledge, achievement, and ability of students from other cultures.
When reviewing district curriculum or creating any lesson plans or assessments, this is something I feel will be important for me to keep in mind and to always check my whiteness.
Of all the voices in the assessment debate, the one least often heard is that of students, yet they have perhaps the most important stake of all.
How do we ensure our students are heard?
Good assessment gives students optimal conditions for showing their capabilities. Variedassessment procedures, fairly introduced and interpreted, give students the chanceto show their individual strengths.
So, so important. Let's set our students up for success.
Who in their right mind would spend eight hours a day, five days a week (and often weekends), in a place they had not liked?
I respectfully disagree with this opinion. The reason why is because I was one of those students who was not passionate about school until college. The reason I am becoming a teacher is because I am passionate about helping students learn, closing the learning gap and changing our education system to make it more engaging and effective.
Worse, Janice came out looking like she hadn't finished the book, when really she probably just had a richer and more complicated view of the story than the test questions could assess. The test was perfect for me, sad to say.
This is disheartening and reminds me of some of my educational experiences. The assessments in schools are not created to test a students' deep understanding, creative abilities, or capabilities to see a story from a new or more complex perspective, but rather their shallow knowledge. Sadly, shallow and useless knowledge is not remembered.