Week 11 Blog Post - Assessment

As a special educator, assessment is a part of what I do every day. Simply put, assessment allows teachers to figure out what students are learning or have learned from their lessons. There are two major types of assessments that teachers utilize in the classroom. Formative assessment refers to assessment procedures conducted by teachers during the learning process in order to modify teaching and learning activities to improve student outcomes. As Rick Wormeli points out here, formative assessment is arguably the most important kind of assessment for teachers, as it allows opportunities for differentiated instruction and descriptive feedback. The other type of assessment is summative assessment. The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional period. As Wormeli shows us, there is usually little chance to go back and edit results of a summative assessment. Summative assessments are fairly anti climatic in that regard, they take place after the learning is over to assess student knowledge of unit information. 

As far as my own philosophy of assessment goes, I find myself agreeing with Wormeli in most circumstances. Formative assessment is a founding principle of the educational process. Students can learn without receiving grades. Students can't, however, learn without the kind of descriptive feedback provided by quality formative assessment. 

In his presentation, Scott Kinkoph used two digital tools to assess learning throughout his presentation, PearDeck and EduCanon. I am familiar with PearDeck and actually utilized the software in conjunction with Google Classroom just last week during a professional development activity for my school. PearDeck is nice because it allows students to respond anonymously to teacher inquiries as the teacher presents. The teacher can then see that information provided by the students and direct their instruction accordingly. I do this almost every day in my own classroom without PearDeck. It is essentially the same as asking the class, "Raise your hand if you believe X to be true, now raise your hand if you believe Y to be true," or, "Who can tell me something about Z?" The cool thing about PearDeck, however, is that the responding is anonymous so that even students who might be too shy to raise their hand can participate without actually saying anything out loud! I think there is something to be said for face to face interaction, however. I think students get more out of expressing their opinions and ideas out into the classroom verbally. Also, since I work in a behavior / special education setting, I cannot trust most of my students to follow along appropriately on a computer while I lead a lesson. Many times, for me, these tools end up being a distraction rather than a class enhancement. I do like what PearDeck brings to some classrooms, I am just not sure that it would necessarily enhance mine all that well.