Tamara Griffith
Assessment
InTASC Standard 6: The teacher understands and uses multiple methods of assessment to engage learners in their own growth, to monitor learner progress, and to guide the teacher’s and learner’s decision making.
Introduction:
Assessment is a crucial piece of the learning process, as all other components of teaching hinge on the insights gleaned from what has been properly assessed. Proper assessments accurately determine students' progress toward content mastery when they are aligned to learning goals and objectives. As a result, properly aligned assessments allow me to make instructional decisions tailored to students' strengths and areas of growth, thus ensuring content mastery. A key component of tailoring assessments is differentiation. Differentiation allows me to create assessments that reflect the skills and abilities of my diverse learners without sacrificing grade level content or rigor. In order to further increase the efficacy of assessments, students need to be actively engaged in assessing and reflecting upon their progress. When students regularly reflect upon their growth, they are able to alter their behavior, study habits, and expended effort in order to maximize their academic achievement. Doing so also fosters student investment. As a result, utilizing a variety of effective assessments and investing students in assessment is crucial to achieving content mastery and attaining my big goals.
Specifically, I utilize diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments. These multiple methods of assessment take place on a daily, monthly, quarterly, and year-long basis. Assessing students in a variety of ways allows me to monitor students' progress toward our classroom big goals and to ensure that students are working toward rigorous, ambitious goals by supporting, verifying, and documenting student learning. Utilizing multiple methods of assessment also allows students to demonstrate their learning and understanding of the content in multiple and varied ways, which improves their ability to transfer their content knowledge and skills autonomously. Furthermore, assessing students in multiple ways gives me a holistic picture of students' proficiencies, as not all students demonstrate their understanding of content knowledge and skills successfully the same way. After administering assessments, I analyze student data. Analyzing student data allows me to identify learning gaps and patterns, which allows me to adjust the pacing of my year-long, unit, and lesson plans as needed. Additionally, analyzing assessment data allows me to better differentiate for my students and informs student groupings for both enrichment and remedial small group instruction. In so doing, I maximize opportunities for student learning and growth.
Click on the images below to explore how I use diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments to monitor students' progress and to inform instructional decisions as well as how I engage students in their own growth.
Table of Contents:
All in all, proper assessment is the cornerstone of effective teaching and learning. Utilizing a range of assessments, such as diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments, allows me to gather relevant data before, during, and after learning has occurred. Analyzing the data gathered before, during, and after learning allows me to make instructional innovations that lead to improved student outcomes. These improved student outcomes stem from differentiation, which includes purposefully grouping students based upon their skill proficiencies or deficiencies so that students receive appropriate remediation or enrichment to ensure content mastery. When skills are appropriately differentiated, students are challenged with the appropriate level of rigor, preventing both boredom and frustration and leading to greater student investment. Engaging students in assessment, such as through tracking and providing feedback, also builds student investment. Furthermore, as students engage in multiple methods of assessment, they receive varied opportunities to demonstrate their content knowledge and skills. Moreover, by utilizing diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments, not only am I able to engage students in their growth, but I am also able to monitor student learning and make more informed instructional decisions. For example, by critiquing, tracking, and analyzing data from these multiple forms of assessment, I am able to more effectively plan for instruction and develop instructional strategies that optimize student learning and growth.
