Saturday, January 24, 2009

What is Assessment??

Assessment is defined as the process of obtaining information for making decisions about students, curricula, programs, schools, and educational policy. There are three different ways to assess students: Formative, Diagnostic, and Summative. Formative assessment is more informal and provides feedback to learners as part of an ongoing process. Two examples are self-tests and textbooks. The problem with self-tests is that they do not provide feedback or allow students to get help with problems. Formative assessment makes teaching more efficient and stops problems before they start. Diagnostic assessment focuses on questions. It is done to describe specific content (usually certain weaknesses) and particular instructional strategies required to help a student attain a particular learning target. Summative assessment is the most common means of checking students' work. You can do this by administering a midterm or a final exam. It is an approximation of a student's achievement at a given point and time. It usually informs instructors about learning gaps after it is too late.
Some ways to introduce classroom assessment techniques are to keep the course objectives in mind, plan for consistency, provide a rationale, strive for clarity, respond quickly and explain changes, and communicate changes.
["Classroom Assessment Techniques" Video Presented by Shaun Longstreet, Ph. D.]

2 comments:

  1. Hello Alyssa,
    This is a great way to put the definition of assessment.I had some of the same ideas and evaluations myself. Keep up the good work!
    Neijah Barnes.

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  2. You touched on some interesting points that I didn't go over in my own blog. I liked how you spoke about ways to introduce classroom assessment techniques and this super cute layout!!

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