Assessment Formats

Charlotte Kotopoulous

Regis University

EDEL_450 Assessment of Learning

Introduction

• Assessments are essential to teaching. They help guide the development of each individual student, by monitoring them, and improving the quality of each lesson and unit. Teachers who perform good assessments, have good instruction and understanding of what students are learning. We are going to examine the different strengths and limitations of some assessments used by teachers.

Observations

• Strengths: Influences instructional practice, improves teacher-student relationships, instant feedback, focuses on students learning.

• Limitations: Only useful in student active situations, or student groups where students can interact and collaborate

Essays

• Strengths: Allows students to express their ideas, can show students knowledge and understanding, can show depth of learning

• Limitations: Time consuming, some students lack ability in their writing, grades can be subjective

Presentations

Advantages: authenticity of presenter, question and answer sessions are great life skills, students learn new information from peer presentations, can be done individually or in a group

• Limitations: Time consuming, students may find presenting difficult

Projects

Advantages: Engages students to learn, teachers can measure student’s learning, allows for collaboration

Limitations: Not every student participates, they so not reach every learning style

Posters

• Advantages: Benefit visual learners, allow peer to peer interaction, student’s learn from other peers posters

• Limitations: Subjectivity in grading

Standardized Tests

• Advantages: Less time consuming, easy to administer, allows schools and states to get comparison

• Limitations: Make teachers teach the test, evaluates a student’s performance not overall growth, effects the ways teachers teach, stressful

Portfolios

• Advantages: Contains evidence of students skills, demonstrate progress, reflect on students strengths and weaknesses

• Limitations: Time consuming, hard to mark objectively, authenticity of evidence may be questioned

Conclusion

• There are many different types of assessment tools educators can use with their students. Each assessment targets different students learning abilities. Implementing alternative assessments will give teachers a solid foundation for their instruction, which will make their lessons more effective.