Assessments

Assessment is vital in the classroom because it is needed to see how students are learning. When asked the questions, "How do we know students are learning?" and "How do we know our teaching is effective?", both have the same answer: Assessment and Evaluation. Both of those tools are used to check that students are learning, and if students are learning then that means that our teaching is effective. 

     
An assessment of learning is a summative assessment, meaning that it is a check at the end of a unit or year to see what was learned. It is to make sure the student understood the entire topic. An assessment for learning is formative assessment, meaning that it occurs during the learning process. It is to check up with students while they are learning to make sure they are understanding concepts and to clear up any issues that there may be. 

To learn more about assessment and feedback, I read the article Seven Keys to Effective Feedback that was found on Eclass. This article defined feedback as information about how we are doing in our efforts to reach a goal. Helpful feedback is goal-referenced, tangible and transparent, actionable, user-friendly, timely, ongoing, and consistent. The article also discusses the difference between feedback and advice. For example, just saying "You need more examples in your report", there is nothing to learn from that. It is not tangible, or actionable, it does not provide resources on how to do that. Same with evaluation and grades. Just saying "Good work!" or "This is a weak paper" does not give the student any actionable information about what occurred. You only receive a judgment on your work, not how to improve it. 

Reading this article was interesting to me because I do not think I ever really considered the difference between advice, evaluation, and feedback. I thought that saying "Good presentation!" was a form of positive feedback. But feedback needs to provide something like being oriented towards a goal or giving an action to complete. This article is important to me because as a teacher I will be giving my students feedback to help them improve, and I want to make sure that my feedback is valuable to them. By reading this, I learned how to provide feedback to help the student improve.