Notes for Acts of Teaching: Chapter 9 (Pgs.
303-309)
Evaluating Students Learning
Defining Classroom Assessment. Measurement, and
Evaluation
- It requires teachers to continually gather accurate
information about their students' progress across a
range of sources, to synthesize that information, to
make judgments about how well or how much each
student has learned, and to adjust instruction
accordingly.
- Assessment is the process of collecting,
synthesizing, and interpreting information to aid in
decision making.
- Process of using our assessment information to
make this judgment is called evaluation.
Factors Influencing Assessment Quality
- no single assessment is completely accurate, so
teachers must draw from across multiple sources,
thiis process is called triangulation.
Sources of Information
- sources of information, such as cumulative
records, observations, and interviews.
(1) Students' Work
- Obviously, a great deal of useful information is
gained through assessing students' work.
- Teachers often want to know how a student arrived
at an answer.
(2) Tests or Projects
- These require students to demonstrate how well
they have learned targeted concepts and skills, and
they allow teachers to describe their students'
performance.
Accuracy of Information
- no single assessment is ever totally free of bias or
error.
Should be asking:
(1) Does the information provided by the
assessment allow reasonable conclusions to be
drawn about what the student has learned (validity)?
(2) Does the assessment provide consistent
measurements (reliability)?
Validity
- refers to the extent to which a particular
assessment provides information that allows
accurate and meaningful conclusions to be drawn.
Reliability
- Consistent measures of your students' learning.
- As with validity, no assessment can be expected to
provide exactly the same measurements every time,
so reliability, like validity, must be thought of as a
matter of degree.
Students with Special Needs
- accommodations refers to adaptations in the
testing environment that change only the manner in
which students participate in the assessment.
- When an assessment is adapted in ways that
change the intellectual task or cognitive level being
assessed, modifications are being made.
Types of Assessment: Formative versus
Summative
Formative assessment
- refers to assessment conducted during the course
of instruction.
- Such assessment provides feedback while it is still
possible to influence the instructional and learning
process.
- To monitor and guide a learning process while it is
still in progress
- During the process
- Informal observation, quizzes, homework, pupils'
questions, worksheets
- Improve and change a process while it is still
going on
Summative assessment
- is the term used to describe assessment conducted
after instruction is completed.
- This type of assessment is used to make final
judgments about a student's learning.
- To judge the success of a learning process at its
completion
- At the end of the process
- Formal tests, projects, term papers
- Judge the overall success of a process; grade,
place, and promote.