Warning: Anxiety Ahead...a TEST. Oh, no! I have to take a test. Oh, how I hate to take tests.
Tests and assessments often come with a negative connotation, but there is far more to assessment than just tests and anxiety. In giving assessment an overall definition, it is a system of evaluating student progress. More specifically, assessment is any activity that teachers and students engage in to produce information about students. These activities can include what we know to be traditional assessments, but we also use assessment to determine nontraditional measures such as student behavior and teacher effectiveness. Marzano (2012) found that teacher assessment is integral to improving student learning. Assessment allows teachers, educators, and policymakers to modify education in some way with the ultimate goal of gains in student learning (Amua-Seyki, 2006).
There are a multitude of ways to assess students, but these all fall in the categories of formative assessment and summative assessment. Each has its own place in the classroom. Teachers use formative assessments to make quick, short-term instructional decisions. Just a few types of formative assessments include:
Classwork
Group work
Individual work
Quizzes
Exit Tickets
Homework
Running Records
Projects
Presentations
Self-Assessments
Summative assessments are more structured and show results learned. These types of assessments allow policymakers to make decisions about programming (Pellegrino, 2014) by identifying gaps in learning or weaknesses in curriculum (Fuglei, 2021). Summative assessments include:
Exams
Cumulative Projects
End-of-Unit-Tests
Standardized Tests
Lesson objectives should be based on the standards. But how do assessments play into this? Assessments allow teachers to develop lesson objectives that reflect data that show where there are gaps in learning. The backward design helps teachers plan units based on student needs (Rea & Roman, 2019). To develop lesson plans and lesson objectives, teachers need to compare the test results (that show what the students know) to what they should know (Lewis et al., 2010). Sometimes, students may have proficiency in some standards but not others. Assessments help determine which standards should be the focus of instruction. Then when re-assessing, the objectives for these new or further assessments should based on the learning standards that showed gaps in the initial assessments.
References
Amua-Sekyi, E. T. (2016). Assessment, student learning and classroom practice: A review.
Journal of Education and Practice, 7(21), 1-6. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1109385.pdf
Fuglei, M. (2021). How teachers use data to improve instruction. Resilient Educator.
Lewis, D., Madison-Harris, R., Muoneke, A. & Times, C. (2010). Using data to guide instruction
and improve student learning. SEDL Letter, 22(2), 10-12. https://sedl.org/pubs/sedl-letter/v22n02/SEDLLetter_v22n02.pdf
Marzano, R. J. (2012). The two purposes of teacher evaluation. Educational Leadership,70(3),
Pellegrino, J. W. (2014). Assessment as a positive influence on 21st century teaching and
learning: A systems approach to progress. Psicologia Educativa, 20(2), 65–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pse.2014.11.002
Rea, L. O. & Roman, J. L. S. (2019). Implementing backward design to improve
students’ academic performance in EFL classes. Espirales.https://orcid.org/0000-0003-
留言