Assessment Examples
Assessment #1
This is one of my more successful assessments I’ve created mainly due to the fact this allowed the students to personally reflect on their experiences and practice self-honesty. In life in general, self-honesty is something that takes courage and isn’t always easy to practice; however, it is a crucial aspect to improving and development. What made me so happy about this assessment, is the students were able to practice self-honesty from their personal experiences and use that self-honesty to develop a personal goal they could work towards in future classes.​​
Assessment #2
This is another one of my more successful assessments I’ve created, greatly due to level of detail that went into the assessment. However even with the level of detail that occurred, the students were still able to reflect on themselves and self-honesty. What personally made myself proud of this assessment, is this sheet helped the students walk through a common reflection process that allowed the students to more fully understand on how to reflect after assignments.
Assessment #3
This is one of my least successful assessments that I’ve created, mainly due to the fact there was too much information presented making it difficult for the students to follow along and focus on the important aspects of the lesson. This assessment was apart of one of my lessons that went sideways and didn’t meet personal expectations. A lot of this had to do with the fact I went a little overboard with information which hindered the learning experience of the students. While this isn’t my “proudest” moment as a teacher, I think this helped shape my assessment process as a teacher and allowed myself to learn from my mistakes.
Overview On Assessments
I personally believe that assessments are a crucial component to development and learning, not just for the students but for the teacher as well. When done properly and in the right setting, assessments can give crucial feedback to both the teacher and the students on how well the information is actually being learned. Assessment don’t always have to be these “grueling and intimating” quizzes or tests that make up a good majority of the students grade, rather they can be used throughout the entire semester as a tool to adjust or make modifications as needed to best compliment the students. It’s also important to mention that assessments give both students and teachers a physical entity to see how well the students are doing throughout the course, and (most) students thrive on structure and positive reinforcement. When students can physically see how well they are doing in the course, this can be used as additional motivation to continue their learning process.
When I create assessments, typically the first thing that I do is identify the end goal(s) based on the assignment, standards, lesson, etc. By identifying what the objective of the assessment is we are able to create an assessment that best compliments the objective. It’s also very important that when we as teachers create assessments, they are organized, clear, and direct to give as much structure and clarity as possible. If our assessments are confusing, chaotic, and unorganized it is unrealistic to expect our students to be able to demonstrate their proficiency in the content knowledge presented.
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I also believe that when creating assessments it’s also important to understand who you learners are and best compliment their skills when demonstrating competency and proficiency of the learned material. When we as teachers give/use assessments it’s important that we give these assessments in a variety of methods to best compliment the strengths of our students. For example, there are a lot of students who really struggle with the concepts of “traditional” quizzes and/or tests, if we are aware of this knowledge and we only use quizzes and tests as our method for assessing… are we really doing what is best for our students? With this being mentioned, I do believe that there is value in any type of assessment method given, but we as teachers need to understand and be aware of the different types of values that coincide with each method. By being fluent and comfortable with various methods of assessing students we can best compliment our students learning styles and skills.
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With all this being said, assessments are a crucial aspect of education when given in the right setting and context. Assessments can be a great tool for motivating the students and giving feedback to both the students and teachers to help create the best learning environment possible.