Forms of Assessment

Informal vs. Formal Assessment

Informal Assessment: During some science lessons that I did at the preschool on campus, the children would ask questions and make comments as they worked with the flying machines they were creating. The conversations they had about the materials they were using to make the flying machines and what would fly better/more efficiently showed me what they knew about flight and gravity and the way air would affect their creations. It was helpful to use this kind of assessment to gauge their learning without putting pressure on the children to answer my specific questions.

Formal Assessment: In the same lesson, we had a contest and threw our flying creations off of the roof to see whose would fly the longest through the air. The children knew that this was the culminating event of the project, and they all worked towards winning this contest as they built. We had a planned time and day that the contest would happen, and the children were all really excited about whose flying machine would be the best. By building a flying machine that would actually fly the best, the children would have had to have gained real knowledge from the experiments that we did with lots of materials to see which ones would glide through the air best. Then they applied that knowledge to their own work. I needed to see what the children knew at the end of the semester in a summative assessment, but I wanted to be able to gauge all the children's work. I also wanted them to be excited about their "final" test with their flying machines.

Traditional vs. Authentic Assessment

Traditional Assessment: With my young toddler class, we had a little quiz about what colors they all knew. I read the colors out and had the children each point out something that color that they could find. With the traditional assessment, it was easy for me to go through and check yes or no for each color the children did or did not know.

Authentic Assessment: To gauge the young toddlers' art work from over the span of the summer, I had them each work with me to create a portfolio. It had images of the children working, some images of scanned work, and some videos of the children working too. This was authentic assessment, because the children were able to practice their drawing and painting skills and then show me the completed work in their portfolios. This worked well to see their progress over the entire semester and use their work production to assess their learning of the art concepts we talked about (how to hold a paintbrush, how to apply paint, how to clean a paintbrush, etc).

Criterion-referenced vs. Norm-referenced Assessment:

Criterion-referenced Assessment: With a kindergarten class, I could have a reading test of specific sight words and test the children's knowledge of those words by having them read them off to me. I could gauge their mastery/non-mastery by how many words they were able to recognize and read. This would give me a solid base to start building towards seeing which children would need more instruction with sight words.

Norm-referenced Assessment: In a kindergarten class, I could have the children each bring in a reading chart from home with the name of the book and amount of time the child either read at home with another person or by themselves. Then I could have a chart in the classroom on my desk to be able to personally gauge how much time each child was spending at home reading and see who was reading the most and who was reading the least comparatively to the other children in the classroom. I could break the children into groups based on this assessment and make sure I am giving children who may not have books at home or someone to read with ample time to work on their reading skills. It would also show me who was the strongest reader in the class (or most interested) and who I would need to work with more diligently.

Paper-pencil vs. Performance Assessment:

Paper-pencil Assessment: In a kindergarten class, I could assess if the children know how to write their name by having them write their name down on their name tags for their desks. That would also give them ownership of their name tag knowing that they wrote it out themselves. This kind of assessment would be nice for this, because the majority of children like to write their own name.

Performance Assessment: For a social studies activity with older elementary children, I could have them follow a list of directions on a map around the school to test their knowledge of north, south, east, and west. This would show me whether they could use those words with directions and a compass to travel around the school. This would be a more interesting way to assess the children's knowledge of directions than a true false quiz.

Standardized Test vs. Teacher-developed Assessment:

Standardized Test: The TCAP test for children in Tennessee is a standardized test provided to gauge the children's knowledge of concepts they think that they should know. This is helpful to see what objectives the children are not meeting and how to provide more instruction in these areas.

Teacher-developed Assessment: I could give out a spelling test I made for my third graders to test if they knew the spelling words we had been talking about in our class that week. I could personalize the test more towards my classroom and what we had been specifically talking about with one another.

Class activity reflection: grading art (assessment)

In class on Thursday, we did an activity where we brainstormed solutions for an art teacher's grading system. I used to be an art major, and I have been in art classes my entire life. I have seen assessment and grading done a variety of ways on a such a subjective group of work.

One thing that we did in high school was either write a justification for the work that we were doing, or we would get up and explain the work to our teacher and classmates at the end of the grading period. It did not matter how much work was produced, but if we were in class every day actually working, and then we could explain our work well at the end of the semester, we got an A. It took the pressure off of producing a plethora of mediocre work and opened the way to being able to really spend time on specific, detailed pieces of work.

In the college art classes that I have had, the first couple semesters, we would do presentations on artists for supplemental grades. The majority of our grades came from being able to justify and explain our work during class critiques at the middle and end of the semesters. The first few semesters we had very structured directions on how many square feet of paintings we had to have complete and what the topics/subjects were. For example a group of assignments for a body of work could be to experiment with color. That absolutely looked different for every single person, but it was still really intriguing to hear every person explain how they incorporated that assignment topic into every piece (or in some cases one ginormous piece) of work.

My last semester of painting studios used an exhibition approach to assessment. We did not have any assignments or regulations at all, but we had a show at the end of the semester. If your work was phenomenal, it could be bought or noticed by other professors and artists who attended. Those were a few external motivators. Internally it was motivating to myself to make sure that I had the best work that I could have to present, so I would create tons of work all semester, and then I would chip away at the pieces that I wanted to exhibit and the pieces that were better off left in the studio.

The exhibition of my work was the most motivating and least structured of all the assessment types I have had in art. I wanted to be the best I could be and be the most true to my work, so I would work really hard to make sure that my pieces reflected that. Also knowing that everyone was going to see my work and that if I slacked it would be painfully obvious was really motivating too.

Interests

After our first class, I am interested to hear about parent-teacher relationships and how to talk with parent's about conflicts and problems at school. During our introduction activity, many of us commented on how parent-teacher relations will be a great challenge during the first year of teaching.

We also listed many adjectives about what makes someone a professional in their field, and it was interesting the different adjectives people came up with. For me, it is interesting to be in a 400 level class where we all (for the most part) are preparing for teaching careers and working towards a common goal.

I want to understand better how to be an effective teacher. I am really interesting in the relationships side of teaching, and I am interested to talk about how different students learn and even how the student's parents learn and communicate with educators.

I think this class will help me in my future career to understand how to teach better to all different types of learners and students. I am hoping that this class will prepare me better to work with a wide range of different people: professionals, students, and parents.