Assessment - It's a BIG deal!

Assessment has always been a big issue in education.  We learn about formative and summative assessment in the College of Education.  Formative assessment "is a range of formal and informal assessment procedures employed by teachers during the learning process in order to modify teaching and learning activities to improve student attainment" while summative assessment "refers to the assessment of the learning and summarizes the development of learners at a particular time."  We are taught that a student created rubric is a great way to ensure accountability and helps with student engagement.  We learn about bias and discover ways on how to avoid bias in our own classroom.  We have experience in the classroom with assessment and discover the time it takes to get an accurate reflection of a student's learning.  Assessment is a big deal and a big part of our lives as teachers.  

During my internship, my co-operating teacher and myself benefited from formative assessment.  We would have daily quizzes and homework that ensured us that the students were understanding the material taught.  The daily formative assessment often kept us aware of the students who were struggling with the material and, therefore, allowed us to recognize those students in need of individual help.  Weekly Friday exams allowed students to have homework-free weekends and allowed us, as teachers, to know whether the material being taught should be reviewed the next week or that the knowledge base of the classroom was secure enough to move on to new material.  The presence of formative assessment allowed us to keep the students progressing at a rate that allowed them to understand the material being taught.  When a weekly exam was summative, I believe the past formative assessments helped the students achieve their best results.  

"Interactive E-Assessment - Practical Approaches to Constructing More Sophisticated Online Tasks" , an article by Geoffrey Crisp, states that "(o)ne of the issues with many current assessment designs is that they foster a dependency in students on the teacher; this dependency is related to students believing they cannot make judgments about their own learning or performance level without input from the teacher.”  I thought a great idea to combat this dependency is student-created rubrics that we have discussed in our education classes.  In that way, the accountability falls on the shoulders of the student instead of the teacher making the students better independent learners.  

Bias is an uncomfortable subject.  Mr. D. on CBS gives a satirical view on teacher bias in the following YouTube clip.  

Although the comedic clip is exaggerated, we, as teachers, have to ensure that we try our best to avoid bias.  During internship, I was advised by my co-operating teacher to mark one section at a time.  This suggestion saved time and helped to avoid bias because I was unaware of whose test I was marking for each section.