Assessment in Classrooms

This week in class we had the opportunity to discuss assessment and ways to make assessment meaningful for the students. Students often flip through the assignment missing all the encouraging comments the teacher gave in order to find the only important thing for them, the mark. As teachers we need to find ways to help students improve and assess the students by giving them more than just a letter grade or percentage.

The following are three tips that I found the most helpful when thinking of ways to assess students.

Tip 1: Focus on important concepts

This tip considers two things in one. When providing assessment pieces teachers should try and stay away from the miniscule details and really focus on the big ideas of the unit. When focusing on the big ideas try to create assessments that examine one idea at a time. Assessment pieces that focus on multiple ideas will confuse students and can wear out the students when they are completing the task. The second aspect of this tip is that when you are marking only look for the big ideas and the successes of the student. If there is a majority of the work that is filler allow the student the chance to redo it so that they are able to meet the expectations

Tip 2: Grades are not the best policy

Grades can cause anxiety in students especially if they feel pressured that they must receive a high mark every chance they can. Instead of a teacher focusing on the grade he/she should try to use comments that focus on the success of the student. If comments and grades are used students will not improve their work. The students will read the grade and bypass the comments not understanding the areas for improvement or where they excelled. As future teachers we should focus on giving the students comments on their work unless giving a grade is absolutely necessary.

Tip 3: Don’t be like Mr. D

Friends of teachers may think teaching is easy if they just watch Mr. D. Mr. D provides teachers with an example of how not to mark papers or how to administer assessment to students. The following two videos are examples of reasons as to why students may feel anxiety around assessments. Teachers should strive help students feel confident around assessment and give the students multiple opportunities to succeed.

Assessment practices should not be used to put fear into students. Teachers should not feel a need to include pop quizzes, or unit tests weekly but look for the other ways that they are able to assess students without the pressure of a test setting. The growing success document has fundamental principles that as teachers we should constantly be referring to. The most important of those fundamental principles is that the teacher should support all students and provide multiple, varied opportunities to demonstrate their learning. Assessment is no longer about how well a student can score on a test and now examines the students’ progress of understanding as a whole.

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