What is the purpose of assessment?  What kinds of assessment do you see being used in the classroom?  How can you see assessment being used in the classroom?  How can you see assessment being used to make teaching and learning better for students?

Field Experience Connection: Assessment in education today has a much different connotation than it did when I was in school.  In my cooperating teacher's classroom, I see many different kinds of assessment which allows students to feel comfortable with the idea of assessment.  She uses short cycle assessment a lot to see if the kids are getting what she is teaching.  She will often teach a mini-lesson using direct instruction, allows the students to practice, and then reviews with a few questions.  Students often will be asked to raise their right hand for one thing or their left hand for another, stand up/sit down, or make different movements for different answers.  This allows her to know what the students know, gets the students up and moving, and is almost an anonymous way to assess since the students are busy moving they are not paying attention to what the other students are doing.  Formative assessments have also been used in this classroom.  My cooperating teacher designed a formative assessment similar to what the students would see on an OAT-type test.  Therefore, the benefit of assessment was two-fold: the teacher is assessing student progress on certain indicators while the students are getting practice in being familiar with the question structure of a standardized test.  My cooperating teacher also uses pre- and post-assessments in her classroom - especially for vocabulary.  Type II writing is one of her favorite methods to post-assess vocabulary knowledge because the students are able to put the words into their own context and then circle the vocabulary words within the written paragraph(s).  My teacher often tells her students, "This is a great opportunity to show what you know!" when presenting them with an assessment.  Her words echo those of Powell on page 262 when Powell suggests that teachers with a positive approach on standardized assessment will "guarantee happier, more productive students along with the real possiblity of higher scores."  Her standardized assessment scores do show positive value-added in language arts, so I will definitely be using this mentality with my own classroom because it works!

Reference / Text Connection: I feel like the purpose of assessment is to monitor student progress.  I felt this way during class even before I read the supporting chapter in Powell's Introduction to Middle School.  Powell takes the stance of the NCTM's four purposes of assessment.  The first purpose of assessment is to evaluate student achievement and recognize accomplishment; the second purpose is to monitor student progress and promote student growth; the third and fourth purposes are related to "either instructional or program revisions and are recognized and acted upon less frequently than the first two" (p. 240).  Although Powell believes that assessment data is acted upon less frequently to influence instructional or program revisions, I feel that this is changing in the educational sphere.  Columbus Public has curriculum consultants who work at the schools who are in Academic Watch each day in order to try to improve the instruction and curriculum alignment of teachers.  The school district has acted upon the data from the standardized assessment and want to try to implement some type of action in order to improve student learning.  Schools who are also in Academic Watch without improvement for so many years will also risk "program revisions."  Teachers will need to re-apply for their jobs, so the school district has an opportunity to re-assess who and what will work best to improve standardized assessment scores.  The instructional and program revisions might not be on a classroom teacher's mind, but I think that this is constantly on administrators' minds and affects the choices made within a school district.

Personal Connection:  Like I said at the beginning of this entry, assessment had a different connotation for me when I was in grades K-12.  I think times have changed in education.  Although school systems are much more adamant about standardized assessment than when I was in school, I feel like the everyday classroom assessment is not approached with as much anxiety.  My former teachers typically assessed us with traditional tests or quizzes, which is an example of forced-choice assessment (Powell, 2005, p. 244).  Although this is one of the sevond forms of classroom assessment, I rarely was assessed in any other way.  Occasionally a teacher was brave enough to assign a huge project where we were to have alternate assessments, such as portfolios or visual responses; however, this was not common.  Any assessment that would have resembled a formative assessment was still graded.  These practices instilled a fear among students, especially among high-performing students.  There was not an opportunity for students to comfortably show what they know and allow teachers to know what needs to be re-visited without the students feeling like they had to "cram" for a test.  This practice made students memorize, pass a quiz or test, and then forget rather than actually learning and retaining information.  I believe the new outlook on assessment encourages students to actually learn through formative and self-assessments so students will grow a stable knowledge base.

Future Teaching and Learning Connection:  I really feel like assessment is a wonderful tool for teachers to use and make instructional decisions based upon the results; however, I will need the guidance of my cooperating teacher in developing assessments and rubrics because she has so much knowledge and experience to share.  Assessment is an important concept of teaching that needs to be mastered, but I don't think it can be completely mastered without getting the field experience.  Pre-service teachers can only read and understand the different types of assessments.  It is exciting to get in the field to actually get real data and learn how to make decisions based on how the students respond.  I know I will be using pre- and post-assessments as well as formative assessments for the big enduring understandings within my unit.  I need to know the information provided by these types of assessments in order to alter my unit to fit the needs of my students.  I might have the same "skeleton" of a lesson for each block, but I already know that I might have to vary my instruction or methods of presenting information based on the ability levels of each of my blocks.  This will be challenging, but I know that this will enhance student learning.  Developing a unit with the help of a seasoned cooperating teacher is one of the most valuable experiences of this course.  I have new ideas that I'm ready to try and need her knowledge base to know how to tweak it best for each block!