Philosophy of Assessment Nixon1

You may be sitting here thinking, what is assessment? Assessment is

evaluating or measuring what the student mastered. It also provides teachers
with feedback on students mastery, but also their mastery to teach the concept.
One tool that plays a major part in assessment is the Comprehensive Assessment
Model. The CAM process starts with writing goals or units you want to cover.
This way you have a goal to check and see what they mastered. The second is to
include a summative assessment in written form. Third is the performance
assessment by presentation. Fourth we want to include formative assessments
and maintain progress. Lastly, you want the student to understand what goals
theyre going to meet. To continue, you want the students to see what they
struggled with, but also how each time they practiced the results changed. From
the Rhode Island document, there are many different kinds of assessments that
can be used. For example, the document talks about: formative, summative,
benchmark, and diagnostic assessments. Formative is a daily assessment that is
split into two types. The first is informal, which is evaluating, but there is no
points. For example, an observation that measures mastery would be one. They
need no planning and they are on-the-fly assessments. The second type is formal,
which evaluates using small indicators like a quiz. Formal are planned and very
important in a mastery-based classroom and they are not given points.
Summative assessment is not daily it occurs after a unit like a unit test.
Diagnostic assessments are given by a psychologist to determine learning
disabilities or giftedness. These evaluations can pinpoint specific areas of
weakness and strengths. Data from diagnostics can be used to place students in
learning support or gifted classrooms. Benchmark is an assessment, which is
given as a pretest first to determine a baseline for a students learning. For
example, in math, third grade, an initial benchmark or baseline is given before
teaching on multiplication facts and application (Tier 1,2). Students are grouped
according to results. Then the teacher instructs, after six to nine weeks, the
teacher re-issues the same type of benchmark. Data then regroups students and
helps the teacher change their instructional strategies. This can occur from unit
to unit or grading period to grading period. There are teacher made benchmarks
and company-made benchmarks. Comprehensive systems are very important to
use. They use a lot of mastery, which lets the student and teacher see, what they
mastered and what they need more of. In the Hanover document, they discuss
why mastery based learning is important and that it is actually showing students
in-depth what they know. This system would replace the point system. The
document tells us in point system students just look for the letter grade and move
on. With mastery they have to see what concepts they didnt compile. Today, we
have many great laws for education such as FERPA. FERPA regulates privacy
and student information. In my classroom, my students will be assessed daily. I
will have graded worksheets that will be two points so I can measure if I need to
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reteach a lesson. Also, I will have exit slips, homework, and unit tests. Each one
of these allows me to see what my students have mastered and what we need to
work on. Whether it is how Im teaching or how they understand the material.
Since we grew up with NCLB (No Child Left Behind Act), I feel its
important to talk about the new law that replaced it, which is ESSA. ESSA
(Every Student Succeeds Act) evaluates that everything covers standards, all
students are proficient or above, and performance reflects how I am as a teacher.
Three major things have changed from NCLB. The first major thing would be
how ESSA promotes career and college. It pushes more for students to attend
college and gain a career. The second major thing is it now includes Pre-K. Pre-
K now gets funding, standards, and is actually considered. The third major
change is teacher evaluations are no longer based off of student scores. The only
bad thing about this is they havent come up with a new way to evaluate
performance. Standardized testing impacts both students and school districts. In
school districts, the scores are used to effect the teachers evaluation. Now it
shows if they are a good school to attend and causes changes in funding for each
school depending on how they did. Students have to score proficient or above in
order to pass/graduate. If they dont get above proficient, they have to retake the
test. How do these changes affect me as a teacher? There will still be pressure for
my students to do well. Even though my evaluation is not used off of their scores,
it would still affect me that I did not teach a lesson more. I like the change
because it allows for more discussion about college and careers. This is
something I would love to implement in my math classes.
The most common way to grade a student today is through the point
system. Most teachers grew up on this, are lazy, or do not understand mastery to
change. The point system seems like the perfect method to some. In some cases,
teachers feel the points are randomly assigned to students so they do not match
other students scores. Students only memorize material for a test, once it is over
they just look to see if they got an, A or an, F. Students only look to see if they
passed or failed. On the contrary, mastery-based learning shows us what specific
skills the student mastered. This is a great method, but its a lot more work. This
method actually gets to the point and shows us what the students get or do not
understand. In the point system, teachers do not know if students comprehend
the information or if they are just good at memorization. I want to be able to use
both methods in my classroom. The point system would be for homework and
unit tests. Most of my assessments I would want to grade mastery. The only
tricky part would be telling if they mastered the concept or not, so I would need
to make a key. The key would say proficient, mastered, or needs more practice.
One of my favorite visual graphics to use is called a Bell Curve. Bell
Curve is a visual that shows a normal distribution of data. I would use a Bell
Curve to assess my class test results. The standard deviation would be the
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average received on the test, and then I would include other students scores who
varied away from the average. If I had students who did better, they would be
placed on the right side, and those who did lower on the left side. I would then
find the area under each curve to give me my percentiles. This visual can be used
for CRT and NRT. CRT is given to students and is based on preset criteria or
standards. NRT is based on students of a certain age group in a preset
environment and the scores are compared to students of the same age and group.
These are important to see where a teachers students are at compared to other
districts. A 21st century classroom gives students freedom, bases learning off of
research, and lacks discipline problems. Four themes are creativity, media usage,
critical thinking, and problem solving. In my classroom, creativity will be big
since most students think math is boring. I want to include math bingo or
making a Pi day song instead of just lecturing. For the media source, I will have
my students research their future careers and explain how their job will use
math. This also causes them to critically think about their future as well as the
connection.
Overall, I have been inspired to use and learn about assessments and
technology. The best thing so far was going to my observation and being able to
use what I learned in class. This demonstrates to me how much I have mastered
and what I can build on as a student. I learned about interesting new websites
that have the assessments I can use. I can apply all the assessments, the mastery
learning, the point system, and the education laws, into my classroom. I cannot
wait until I get to show my journey to mastery.