Reflection #8 - Assessing Student Learning

Describe 

This week we completed tasks and read about assessment.  The reading covered topics such as the various types of standardized assessment and their purpose.  It then went into detail about constructing assessments.  Finally the reading covered performance assessment and its effectiveness. Our questions and quizzes this week focused on instructional objectives and how they relate and drive the development of assessments.

Analyze

Assessments and their creation is something that must be first determined after the development of learning objectives.  Objectives should drive the type of assessments that are created for students. First having an understanding of Bloom's taxonomy and the level and rigor associated with objectives helps tremendously.  If objectives are written for students to perform on the lower end of Bloom's taxonomy than it would be fitting for them to complete a written assessment.  However, when using higher order levels of Bloom's taxonomy it requires higher level of assessment such as essay, constructed responses or to real-world application with a performance assessment.  These concepts are important when teacher write learning objectives to meet state standards.

Reflect

When I first began in education almost ten years ago assessment was a difficult thing for me to get right.  I had taken only one real course in college on assessment and it did not fully prepare me for the classroom.  However, being a part of an impact learning community it helped me to realize my weakness.  I began to read about assessment and its various forms and attended a workshop on differentiation and assessment which helped me tremendously.  The change that made this a strength for me was being able to take part in assessment reviews and training with the state of Georgia during my second year teaching.  Getting an understanding of the development and revision process the state uses for assessment items helped me to understand the connection between state standards, learning objectives, and assessment design.

Once I became the department chair for social studies, I wanted to use assessments even more to drive changes made to our daily lessons and unit revision process.  One of the first changes I made was to develop formative assessments that would be shared or common among all common content area teachers.  This process allowed us to share good test questions and performance assessments to create a set of common practices for all students.  Once this was complete we worked on summative assessment and performance assessments.  This allowed my department to ensure a viable curriculum for all students and make sure that everyone was getting as similar as possible feedback specific to the state standards.  After state testing was complete we looked at assessment data to determine areas of strength and weakness within each content and began and still continue to revise assessments to meet the needs of state test takers.

Currently every unit of instruction in our department as a performance assessment that allows students to show what they know and understand. We are working now to develop differentiated performance assessments to meet the needs of all our students.  As of today, the differentiation is in the product they produce however we are looking to change this to differentiate even the level on content required to complete the task.