Assessments

"Is this going to be on the test?", is by far one of the most common questions asked in classrooms throughout America. One of my most revered and respected professors in college once said, "assessment drives learning", and I find that it is so true. Unless students are going to be held accountable for the material that is being covered in class, they simply aren't going to care to retain the knowledge that we as educators are trying to instill into the minds of our students.

As teachers, I think that many of us rely on the most traditional form of assessing student knowledge which is by giving them tests and quizzes. On these forms of assessments, you can often find questions like true/false and multiple choice - questions that aim at lower level thinking skills. I didn't realize this early on in my career until one day one of my colleagues pointed out to me that these questions weren't really doing the students any good. What in life, besides some menus at restaurants, are formatted similar to multiple choice or true/false questions? Out in the real world, bosses don't pop into their subordinates offices and ask them true/false questions, so then why do we as teachers ask our students these types of questions? In my mind, we shouldn't, particularly because each year, our student's ability to read and write appears to have a huge drop off. Therefore as much as students don't like it, and as time consuming as it is for us as teachers to read and grade their writing, we need to continue to build upon these critical skills. Things like text messaging and "iming" have ruined our students ability to read and write the proper way, so they desperately need to be broken of these habits - and the only way to do so is to make them accountable and write!

Lastly, I agree with UBD in that authentic assessments are a necessity. It challenges our students to "think outside the box" when we do things like projects instead of the traditional tests. It is also important to provide these students with a choice, because as well all know, everyone learns differently.