Chapter 4 On-going Assessment

While pondering thru pages of the endless possible ways to assess a student, I began to think back when I was in grade school. The teacher would of course introduce new materials to the class, attempt to gain our understanding and evaluate our performance after she models instruction. Some of us would get it, some wouldn’t, it depended upon what the subject was about. In one particular class, science, we were able to explore and discover things. We became detectives and investigated the way things worked and why. We were clearly interested in the subject matter and our teacher made our learning experience meaningful; which made us love going to science class. On the other hand, in math, the teacher lectured the whole class and told us what to do. Half of us were asleep and lost; and our grades reflected it. As a result, we hated math because it was always the same routine. The point is, in order to assess a student there must be something there to assess. This is where teachers make learning meaningful and engaging in order for students to be involved and actively participating. We all know that everyone learns differently so it is important to differentiate instruction in order to target all learning styles, thus making assessment results successful.

In the text, on page 89, I liked the phrase “Knowing more about students as individuals will help with teaching and learning.” The more we know our students the better. Teaching students is all about building a community within the classroom. It is a safe place and we want students to feel safe and comfortable in knowing that. They spend majority of their time there so it should feel almost like a home away from home. We want to encourage them to bring their backgrounds and prior knowledge into classroom lessons to help them make connections between their lives at school and their lives at home.

We also want to provide interesting materials for students to read. When having a conversation with the class, the teacher should mention some of these things for students to build upon. We can ask them about things they like, give them a survey; have them create a portfolio, etc. Students will more than likely be excited to share their thoughts and interests with others. As a student once before, we used journals to articulate our feelings and interests. Even today, assessments are still on-going. (This blog is an example of my feelings of Chapter 4) I liked to personally do survey tests because if you complete one at the beginning and end it’s almost like you are assessing yourself and your scores are being compared with others.