Assessment and Evaluation

I didn't think I would ever say it, but I was at a three hour workshop this evening on Assessment and Evaluation ... and I really enjoyed it!
This is a topic that does not often reach the top of the list for teachers as to why they chose the profession. We don't generally enjoy the part about assigning marks to students. Personally, I feel it is often quite subjective and unlikely to even remotely capture the essence of the students capabilities.

Fortunately, our speaker was very engaging, yes even entertaining, and had some useful hints on making evaluation less painful.

The following is from a reflection on this workshop that I will hand in as part of a professional development portfolio (so it's written with a particular audience in mind (my instructor) and you might notice some departure from plain informal English).

How Authentic Assessments can Motivate and Inspire Students (the workshop) was a critical incident for me, because I have long struggled with the problem of how assessment and evaluation can be carried out in an effective way. For example, although formative assessments seem like a good idea in theory, there are concerns as to if students will take them seriously. The workshop increased by professional knowledge by providing some very concrete links between the theory and practice of effective assessment. This entry is a reflection on a few of the useful links and ideas to which I was introduced.
Setting clear expectations for what students will produce for assessment, and communicating these expectations to students is of great pedagogical importance. For this purpose, rubrics have gained favour for their directly laid out criteria and descriptions of various levels of achievement. A very subtle point about the layout of a rubric could have an effect on student goal setting and motivation. Traditionally, rubrics list in each row performance indicators ranging from poor to good work in columns from left to right. In an English language context, we automatically read a page from left to right. This means that when a student scans a rubric, he will first read what constitutes poor work - what he has to do to barely pass. If a student decides to read no further, it is clear what kind of work she will turn in. On the other hand, by simply reversing the order of the listed levels of achievement, a student will first read what is required to achieve exemplary performance and be more likely to aspire to this level. This may or may not have the desired effect, but it costs nothing, and I will implement this in all future rubric creations.
An important aspect of assessment for learning is the opportunity to practice a skill and receive constructive criticism in a low stakes assessment. Although a such a formative assessment can play a strong role in supporting student learning, a common concern that I share is that students will not take an assessment opportunity seriously (perhaps not even participating) if it does not count for marks. The workshop suggested that formative assessments can be used in ways that effect student marks indirectly and that students will take the process seriously if they understand this connection. A series of formative assessments provides a body of evidence indicating a student’s performance. If a student has a series of very positive formative assessments and then performs very poorly on a test, the teacher will notice and can find out if there are extenuating circumstances that warrant special consideration. If a student does not buy in to the formative assessment process, a teacher will have less evidence to fall back on if a student performs poorly on a summative evaluation. My goal for my teaching practice is to make extensive use of formative assessment, both for the learning benefit to the student and in order to inform my practice. I will use the knowledge I gained from the workshop to help students understand the importance of participation in assessment tasks that on the surface “don’t count”.
Finally, a particularly useful concept that I learned in the workshop was that of using Authentic Performance Tasks in assessment. In striving to make the curriculum relevant to students, many teachers authentic learning tasks in which students are given real life problems to solve using learning mandated by the curriculum. An authentic performance task extends this to assessment and evaluation by constructing activities where the student work will be performed, exhibited, or displayed for an authentic audience. For example, students could be asked to write a letter to the editor of a local paper and actually submit it for publication. Such an authentic performance task motivates students to perform for an audience external to the classroom, and takes the focus off of the artificial reward of marks. My goal is to devise at least one authentic performance task while on my second practicum and to increase my use of this strategy in my future teaching practice.