Alyssa Migler

Blog Post #6

This blog post I focused on the article, “Every Teachers Guide to Assessment” by
Ronan. I think it is important for teachers to understand the different forms and
variations of assessment to provide to students. Assessment should be differentiated for
students that may struggle with long problem based questions or essay style exams.
Considering in this society that education has become reliant on technology in some
cases, being able to find the correct online tools to provide assessments is key. The
author mentions the software tool “IReady” which “provides adaptive diagnostic testing
and will report on student mastery down to the sub-skill level (Ronan 2015). This applet
helps the teacher see where students are on their skill level pertaining to different
content and how to address the changes needed to instruction. It also is aligned to Core
and State standards so the exams can be built off of those objectives and standards.
There is a key difference in types of assessments and the two major categories are
formative and summative. Formative assessments are used to monitor student
knowledge while they are learning while summative assessments are used to measure
student achievement at the end of the content. Formative assessment examples include
clicker questions, exit tickets, bellwork, quizizz, etc. This helps the students understand
their strengths and weaknesses and helps the teacher monitor student learning to adapt
and change their lessons if needed. Summative assessments include final exams,
projects, portfolios, etc. Both of these types of assessments are important in order for
teachers to monitor student progress and be able to test students' knowledge on key
components and ideas of the lessons. Personally, I have been in classrooms that only
focus on summative assessments and the class is based on the final project/portfolio. I
have also experienced classes that have a lower weight on summative assessments
and solely involve formative assessments with exit tickets after every lesson. I think
there should be a balance between these two types of assessments because teachers
can differentiate instruction for students so they are able to be successful when it comes
to taking tests.

References

Ronan, A. (2015). Every Teacher's Guide to Assessment (Links to an external site.). Retrieved from

http://www.edudemic.com/summative-and-formative-assessments/