Inspecting and Testing the means for Assessment

Inspecting and Testing the means for Assessment

You can find the 2nd Grade assessments that was used during Field Work below:

Pre-test and Post-test

     Personally, I have not always been a fan of assessments because I have always felt that a person's success can not always be proven through the use of a test or evaluation. I always believed that the success of someone should relate to their work and their efforts as well as other means of assessments that were even disguised, so that they weren't referred to as tests or exams. The concepts of an assessment and instruction complement each other and benefit from one another. An assessment helps to tell the teacher what the students need to work and improve on as well as if they had mastered the material and content while the instruction helps the teachers to prepare the students for the upcoming assessments. It's a never ending cycle in the educational world. This is something that I have learned to keep in mind when going through the process of designing an assessment task, activity, or test for the students. 

     

When planning the proper assessment strategy or method to be used in an instruction, time is always a necessity. Planning is often very time consuming and can sometimes take up to several hours just to make sure that the created assessment strategy will be effective with the students that it is being given to. Every teachers' aim should be to make sure that no student gets left behind and that all students are given the equal opportunity for success. The assessments that are created should be designed to specifically benefit all of the students needs without leaving anyone at a distinct disadvantage.  

     Something that I found to be very useful throughout the process of designing a significant assessment resource is the concept of having three types of assessment to go along with whatever instruction or lesson that is being implemented at that designated time. I didn't realize how important it was to explore the qualities of having a formative assessment in between the pre-assessment and summative assessment. Growing up, I always believed that there would only be a pre-assessment later to be followed by a summative assessment that would specifically inform the teacher on the students' progress. As a student, I always loved recieving feedback from my teacher, but I never realized that it was a type of formative assessment because I always recieved written feedback on the papers that were graded. 

The three types of assessments come together to create one big assessment that in the long run will have a beneficial aspect to instruction for the teacher as well as the learner. This pyramid shows an overview of the assessments for what they truly are and how the fold together to form one assessment understanding.

     Organizing an assessment strategy or method is a crucial piece to an effective lesson plan or unit plan. An assessment shows the teacher just how much the student knows or how much knowledge the student has gained by working through the lesson plan or unit plan. Each type of assessment is important to establish and keep in mind when designing a lesson or unit plan and teaching overall. The Pre-Assessments help to identify what the students know before the actual instruction which is always good to have in mind when you are first introducing a lesson so that you know where you are starting from or if the students are prepared to learn the information in the lesson by meeting the prerequisites. The Formative Assessment allows the teacher to record and observe the students progress during the instruction which informs the teacher of how the students are reacting and retaining the information that is being taught. The Summative Assessment is the students final evaluation to see if the students really understood the information and have successfully met and completed the learning objective. All three of these assessments are highly important for the teacher as well as the student throughout any instruction.  

When creating the questions on the pre-test and the post-test, I kept thinking to myself that I didn't want any of the students to feel flustered just like the boy in the picture above. Tests can sometimes build anxiety and discourage children when they come to a question that they do not understand or believe that they can't answer it correctly. I wanted to create student-friendly questions as well as provide student-friendly answers so that perhaps the moment of frustration could be avoided. I knew that in the pre-assessment, some of the students might feel stressed out because they may not know an answer to a question and throughout the whole time that the test was administered, the teacher candidates reminded the students that this test was not graded and that spelling did not count. I felt that this was very important and reassuring to those who honestly did not know the material or were not confident with their answers.

  

    When it came to the pre-test, my group was the last to post our questions and honestly I was the primary contributor to creating the questions. I posted the questions into the pre-test. My group members and myself discussed the types of questions and the content focused within the questions. I did not think that the pre-assessment was a necessity at first, but once I read about the importance of the pre-assessment, I realized that I was wrong and my opinion changed. I have now learned that it takes time to develop relevant, significant questions that can be used in a pre-test. For the post-test, I edited and added questions into the test with the aid of my fellow colleagues on how things should be changed for the post-test. Two questions remained were selected from the pre-test while three questions were new for the post-test which would really reveal how much the students have learned throughout our teaching over the past couple of weeks. As a group, we all had our say in the pre-test and post-test questions. Surprisingly, there were no questions that were difficult to construct for the pre-test and the post-test, but it was difficult to create different questions than those that were created already. The topic of Choosing Our Country's Leaders was difficult to create a variety of questions for because we tried to focus majorly on the vocabulary aspects of the chapter, but there were only three vocabulary words to deal with. It was challenging, but not impossible. Overall, the questions were easy to create because it wasn't a hard topic, but it was difficult to create a variety of different questions that were not similar to those that were already written. 

The results of the pre-test were used when establishing the prerequisites of the lesson plan as well as by figuring out what needed to be the designated focus of the lesson and which words or concepts needed more attention than the others.

        The results of the pre-test showed me just how much the students knew and which concepts needed to be taught explicitly. It wasn't only beneficial for me to see, but it was beneficial for all of the teacher candidates to see because it helped to shape their lessons and provide all of us with a sense of a starting point. It is obvious and expected that not all of the students would be able to answer all of the questions with 100% accuracy, but it does help the teacher to gain knowledge of the students' prior knowledge before actually engaging into the lessons. By observing the answers that the students had given on the pre-test in the Choosing Our Country's Leaders section, I noticed that most of the students had prior knowledge about the president and about what a citizen is. The main focus would be to reinforce the concepts about voting and the capital while using the familiarization of the concepts behind citizenship and presidency. The results of the pre-test also helped when relating to the edTPA commentary prompts because it revealed to me what I needed to do to my lesson plan in order to bring assurance to the table and provide clear explanations to the students. I also needed to find ways to incorporate real world connections into my lesson plan that would give the students the opportunity to make their own connections with what was being taught. For example, while explaining the concept of voting, in the plan we used an example of ice cream rather than relating directly to the literal meaning of voting for a leader. Using the idea of voting for the best selection of ice cream gave the students an opportunity to make a connection with something that they are familiar with. The pre-test would also provide information about what the students know about the central focus for the learning segment by telling me what the students already know. Everything benefits each other when it comes to following the edTPA commentaries and designing lesson plans and unit plans.