Assessment

Assessment is a vital aspect to teaching. It is the way to prove or disprove whether a student is meeting curricular outcomes and indicators. There are 3 types of assessment: for, as, and of.

Assessment for learning is essentially the pre-learning, finding out what students already know about a topic. This assessment can be formative or summative and should guide the teacher’s instruction for the lesson/unit. I have encountered this in this ECUR 165, during week 3 you asked us what the difference between a high school and a collegiate, or a comprehensive school. If we had all known the answer to this question, it would not be worth teaching about. Though through asking one question it was seen that next to none of us knew what the difference was, making it important to explicitly teach.

 Assessment as learning is done throughout instruction to make sure students are achieving desired results and are on track to meet the outcome of the lesson. This was also completed in ECUR 165 when we did our first jigsaw in week 4. The initial teaching of what a jigsaw had been done and we were sent off into our groups to begin the readings and summarizing. Through formative assessment as we were learning you seen that there was some uncertainty on how jigsaws were completed and to what extent summarizing needed to be done. Assessment as learning tells an instructor that students are either or the right track, or a catch and release may be needed (stopping students, rewording or clarifying instruction and then letting students continue working). This was done during this jigsaw by explaining the 2 types of jigsaws and which we would be completing, letting students know they would need to have a succinct summary of the article that gives those who have not read the article enough information to understand the premise and that each student would be required to share this.

Assessment for learning is done after teaching of a topic is completed; it shows whether or not students achieved the desired results. This is the assessment I am currently completing for this class. A website to summarize my learning throughout the course using prompts given by the instructor. This will tell the instructor if most students achieved the desired results and outcomes of the course. In this case the assessment is summative but may also be formative.

A KWL can be an easy way to incorporate all forms of assessment. KWL stands for know, wonder, and learned. When you are achieving know, you are finding out what the students already know about a subject (assessment for learning). When you are finding out what students are wondering about the topic you can guide your instruction and find out if they are leaning their interests towards a particular outcome or result (assessment as learning). When you reach the learned stage, you are doing assessment of learning to see if the students have achieved the desired outcome.