The importance of assessment

Dr. Williams-Black Assignment: Read Chapter 4 in Content Literacy for Today's Adolescents, and write a blog response to the reading.

Two months isn't at all enough time to learn all the ropes of teaching; two months is in fact barely enough time to even learn the most basic skills teaching requires. Unfortunately, that is all the time we are given before we are shipped off and placed in our very own classrooms. As one stands at the front of the room, the training quickly comes back, and some things end up succeeding, while others end up failing. As one becomes more comfortable with the implementation of the basic skills they had learned, the desire to take on more soon arises. For me, the importance of assessing students, as well as the different means to do so, was the first thing I had discovered that went beyond our summer training.

In Content Literacy for Today's Adolescents, Chapter 4 begins by outlining the guidelines for literacy assessment, but although the books specifically talks about the assessments of literacy skills, these guidelines can easily be applied to assessments of any nature. The guidelines are straight forward and informative, emphasizing practices such as using multiple data sources and involving students. Since they were all fairly intuitive, I had already been following each of them prior to the reading of the chapter, at least to some extent.

The middle of the chapter addressed the issue of standardized testing, and then went on to define many of the terms commonly used in the field of assessment. It was vaguely reminiscent of courses I had taken in college, and I began to ponder the pertinence of possessing such knowledge. Knowing the benefits and the drawbacks of standardized testing are definitely applicable since these should have a direct effect on how one teaches in the classroom, but is it really important to know how standardized testing has changed over the last century?

Finally, the tail end of the chapter went on to list specific methods and techniques that can be used for assessing students. The one-sentence summary is a method I have found myself using often in the classroom. With long, complicated definitions in biology, I'll either have the definition displayed on the board or I'll have a student read it from the back of their textbook. Then I'll ask students to create a concise definition that still contains all of the essential information. The activity gets students to think about which parts of the definition are most important, and which can be discarded. After sharing definitions, the student with the best definition is then handsomely rewarded in tickets.