IPTS Standard 8 | Assessment
The competent teacher understands various formal and informal assessment strategies and uses them to support the continuous development of all students.
Artifacts:
EPSY 485 Course Assignment
EPSY 485 Final
These are two projects created for EPSY 485: Assessment of Student Performance. The first project was to create an "assessment during instruction" assessment/activity to help determine what students understand and find gaps in their understanding. In the assignment, we described the context of our school, our unit of study, constructed various assessments during the activity, and our rationale for the assessments (graded or not, conduction of assessment, performance criteria, and planning for the future using the assessment). The second project required the development of a grading policy for an Algebra class describing each grading component in depth, and an approach to grading each of these criteria. The project contained a course description and explanation for my grading policy.
These projects are an example of planning assessments around specific content goals and monitoring student growth and development. The course assignment demonstrates my ability to design various assessments given a unit of study and student context. I had to think of the style of the assessment and the type of questions that would show that the students understood the overall goals. Within the assessment, I have developed a variety of questions for students to demonstrate their understanding of both procedural and conceptual knowledge. The assessment also gives the students the ability to show their understanding and comprehension by applying and synthesizing the material. I also had to keep in mind how and when the assessment was going to be given. Since I administered this quiz at the beginning of class, the assessment would tell me whether students were ready to move on. I used the assessment to have a discussion afterwards to get some input on the problems and address any issues or common misconceptions the students had. I conducted a discourse with the students and gave students opportunities to come up the board and explain how they proceeded with a problem.
Assessments, both formal and informal, are very important for gauging the level of understanding of my students. It is important to keep in mind the goals of what I want my students learn, how I will know when they have learned it, and what I should do next. With assessments, I will be a reflective practitioner and use them for future planning to improve my instruction.