Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Chapter 8: Effective Assessment (Class Abstract and Synthesis)

Abstract:
The introduction of this chapter is a story about a student who was not a very strong writer, but was a really amazing guitar player. The teacher knew that if they gave him a summative test over the book they just finished this student would get an F, so the teacher decided to give the student other options that they could do to prove they know the information. The student ended up making a song and preforming it on his guitar showing full understanding of the information. This is an example of good assessment. The chapter then continues by explaining what makes assessment effective. Some of the things that the chapter suggests are: defining clear goals, make the work motivating, giving students choices for their culminating activity, and using various formats to name a few. The final section of the chapter begins with two sentences that really impact the reader. They are "Good assessment is easy to grade. Complex assessments aren't difficult to track." When making assessment criteria that is what we should keep in mind.

Synthesis:
In the blogs there were some very specific things that a majority of people focused on. One of those things was standardized testing. It became very clear to me as I read the blogs about this that no one is fond of them, and would much rather find some other form of summative assessment to view students understand of information. The other thing that was really popular with the blog postings was appreciating the ideas and options that Wormeli gave for making effective assessment in the chapter. This chapter gave many people really awesome ideas for making their own assessment in their classrooms.

13 comments:

  1. Your second link, Summative Assessment, was very helpful. There is all kinds of information about summative and formative assessment within the link. Thanks!

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  2. Shila-
    Thank you for the Free Teacher Tools website. Great resources! And the site on Summative assessments is really helpful too!

    -Erich

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  3. I really really like that you put up a link for standardized testing. Even though I hear about this term all the time, I am still trying to really understand what it is and why it isn't working. I am glad this site has a history about the testing and I hope that I can learn more about what will impact me and my students very soon. Thanks.

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  4. Wow! What a great resource you have found. I have always had a problem with the way that educators "measure" students and what they have learned because I myself have been systematically left behind because of the way some educators choose to conduct their testing. This is something that will be a great help in the future.

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  5. The last link that you found was AWESOME! I really like all of the ideas that I can use in my class. I always love finding these sites which can help me help my students!

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  6. I like the second link about summative and formative assessment. The pointers about formative strategies are really helpful especially for me, being a math teacher. I could use all the pointers I could get!

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  7. These are some great links, Shila! It's always nice to see what other teachers have done in their classes and being able to access their work is a great tool in any setting.

    Thanks again, and I'm sorry for lying about the advil.

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  8. Love the teacher tools link! It looks like it will be very useful for my future classroom. And--it even looks like an LL Bean bag on the home page so it must be legit! Thanks for posting, assessment is never going away so it is great to have so many ideas on how to do it effectively.

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  9. I really liked your links for the ideas section. It gives a lot of great resources and also helps us teachers expand our knowledge of cooperative learning and graphic organizers.

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  10. Looks like TechTrain has a lot of great resources. Thanks!!

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  11. I really liked your links. The standardized test link and the teacher tools one especially. I never realized that there was a standardized test website. It's cool to see what they have to say about that. Good Job!

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  12. I really appreciate the website with all of the teaching resources. I can't wait to explore all of the different websites and implement them in my classroom.

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  13. Your Idea link is a great one. I spent a lot of time already playing the math games. I will use this link as a fun filler for my middle school classes. Good one!

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