Hotter Than You Think: The Brave New World of Student Assessment
Article found on the Edutopia RSS feed today really calls to activity taking place in the workplace and in my "philosophical" realm. As a person involved with curriculum development, I find it hard to believe that assessment is considered to be a "bad word" by some teachers. If you are teaching, don't you want to know if your students are learning? Effectively planned and executed assessment will show you the results of your work. A syllabus for a course outlines the course objectives--the "yardstick" against which your student achievement will be measured. If your students continually don't understand the lessons, wouldn't any teacher want to spend quality time reflecting on why and fix the problems? That is a simple description of what assessment is, in a nutshell, IMHO.
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Students should be assessed but is it possible that they are assessed too much? It seems to me that all we care about are the test scores. Teachers are now taking all the responsibility for student learning by spoon feeding them. When is education going to be the students responsibility? Or even, the parent's responsibility? It is time that students and their parents care about assessment.
ReplyDeleteWow Megan. You have a lot of loaded statements there. As far as assessments go, whether we like it or not, they are here to stay. State and national assessments are big money. You need to take the ACT in order to get into college. K-12 students take the MEAP or MME (or other state assessment) because the scores are tied to federal funding. Are students assessed too much? Perhaps, but if you use them correctly, they can provide a mountain of information and help you decide how to modify your teaching strategies to help students become more successful. With that said, education should be the responsibility of everyone: the student, their parents, and their educators. Each must do their part for the students to be successful. Unfortunately, we see more and more that teachers are the only ones caring about grades. I don’t have an answer to that. I just try, each day, to reach as many children as I can.
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