Before starting my coursework in Education, I was strongly of the opinion that teachers should not assess student success through the use of tests, especially standardized testing. I leaned more toward what I later learned to describe as portfolios and informal- and performance-based assessments. In other words, good teachers should be able to tell you how well students are doing by interacting with their students day-to-day in the classroom. Not by assigning some abstract number or grade to a piece of paper.
Now that I have completed my degree coursework, I have to admit that ... I have not changed my mind.
Although I do recognize the inevitable: that parents, administrators and community members expect some sort of accountability in the form of numbers and grades.
And I learned through my Assessment class (which I had initially dreaded but ended up getting a lot out of) that there are some ways to use short-answer and multiple choice exams intelligently to assess what students know ... what they need to know ... and what they have learned ... in a less-time consuming manner than the types of assessments I originally preferred.
Ever since I learned I will be student teaching in the fall, I have been making a list of questions for the teacher who will be mentoring me, and there at the top of the list -- in big handwritten block letters is one word: ASSESSMENT. How does she assess her students? What has she found -- through her experience -- are the most meaningful forms of assessment? What do her administrators expect? What will parents expect? What will I do when it comes time to assess my first student work? How will my work be assessed? Questions. I have lots of questions.
One thing I can tell you about assessments: the way questions are formed is almost as important as the answers.
Another thing I can tell you is that it's important to know what it is your are assessing. Hopefully it is something meaningful.
Just this morning I was reading a blog post about assessing student success by Michael K. Stone, the author of Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability. What he had to say resonated with me, especially his last line: "We ought, though, to strive to be the masters rather than the subjects of our assessment tools, to require that our instruments measure what matters most rather than what is most easily counted, and to remember that less easily quantifiable qualities -- community, reverence, respect, health, and affection, among them -- may be those most critical to our lives and futures."1
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