Question: How do you define assessment? Do your classroom practices model this
definition? Think back upon your own learning experiences. Was assessment used
to help you learn or was it used to give you a grade?
Response:
According to Butler and Munn, the purpose of assessment is two-fold. They
state that "Assessment is the act of collecting information about individuals
or groups of individuals to better understand them" and "to provide feedback
to students and serve as a diagnostic and monitoring tool for instruction ."
In my experience, assessment is used as a diagnostic and monitoring tool for
students and teachers, and schools. Student assessment is often used as a
weapon against teachers and schools and is rarely used to understand students
better.
In my daily job, I am not directly involved in student assessments.
However, the vendor-provided online courses my students are enrolled in have
student assessments. Due to this assignment, I did a deep dive into the kinds
of assessments that the online course providers use. There is a mix of
assessments, such as multiple-choice, short written answers, written responses
to a prompt, and project assessments. From what I can see, the purpose of the
assessments is to provide students with a grade for the assignment. I see some
teacher feedback, but it is inconsistent across subjects and teachers. Math
teachers seem to provide more detailed feedback to students. Perhaps it is the
nature of asynchronous online learning where students are not completing work
at a scheduled time and with little or no forced interaction with teachers. As
a result, teachers may not be proactive in using their assessments as a
conduit to connect, communicate and provide meaningful feedback to their
online students, especially when there is no established relationship. Also
many assessments in virtual classes are “system graded” multiple-choice
questions from a question bank. There is no feedback beyond the grade for the
assessment.
Developing good assessments is time-consuming and following up on
those assessments with good feedback is even more time-consuming. In my
experience with k12 virtual learning courses, assessment tends to be "one size
fits all" (from a question bank). Most Asynchronous courses for k-12 students
are structured and follow a course template, and that leaves very little room
for differentiation of instruction, much less assessment. From my observations
and experiences over the last ten years, this is one of the main reasons
online learning fails students who need differentiation in instruction and
assessment.
In my personal experiences as a college student (back in the
1990;s), teachers used assessments to provide a grade. Feedback was primarily
superficial with a teacher's liberal use of a red pen. I cannot recall a
teacher using assessments to provide meaningful feedback, of course back in
the 1990’s the topic of ‘assessment” was not yet being considered.
