How about types of assessments? How do you decide what type of assessment to use? Well,
the type of assessment and what is assessed always starts with the question: What do I
want the students to learn? So you start at the beginning of your lesson plan, what do
I want the students to learn? Another way of saying that, is what is the purpose of
this assignment? Once you’ve decided what they will learn, then you ask: How will they
know that they have learned it? How will I know that they have learned it? That will
determine your assessment. That decides what assessment you use and what’s included in
the assessment. So, yes, I’m saying that before you start writing out a lesson plan,
you already have a rough idea of how you will evaluate the learning that occurs. Then, when
you give the students the assignment, you should also give them the actual evaluation
instrument you are going to use.
There’s a big push in the field of assessment right now to allow learners to be involved
in creating their assessments. So, typically the instructor would suggest several areas
that could be evaluated such as organization, adding personality, grammar, punctuation,
appearance, or pronunciation. Then let the students decide which of those to include.
You know, they may choose three, or four, or have of them and not all six; and let the
students decide the percentage. How heavy is organization valued as opposed to how grammar
is valued. Is grammar thirty percent of the grade and organization is twenty percent of
the grade. You can let the students have input on that. This is another area where, this
is a group assessment. There are too many columns here, I would kind of let the students
decide, you know, what’s important in a group. Is it important that you ask each other
questions instead of sitting there silently? Is it important that you help each other understand
stuff? Is it important that you debate? I would let the students choose 3 or 4 of these
and then you use the “never-sometimes- or always”. That group, group #1, are they
always helping each other? Are they sometimes helping each other? Or are they never helping
each other? And to be honest with you, I would add an “Almost Always” in here. And you
don’t have time to write “Always-Sometimes-Never”. You may have time to write it. For me I would
use the first letter: AA would be ‘almost always’, A would be ‘always’. And you
assist the group. And there’s discussion time together. Then give it back to them and
let them know whether yes they did a good job and they were on topic that time or no
they weren’t. So, I kind of like that especially because groups tend to do well in discussion
at the beginning of a class for a few weeks but toward the end of a class they kind of
get tired and get easily off track. So having a little checklist, chart like this is kind
of nice. You let the students choose which of these to include. You can also do it per
person in the group.
The advantage to letting students get involved in creating the assessment is that it teaches
them the metacognitive skills of what helping is, what does that mean and what do it look
like? What does persuading mean and why would it be in here? Liken it to debating, it teaches
them that kind of metacognitive skills, it teaches them metacognitive skills and just
evaluation skills in general. The biggest disadvantages are that it takes a lot of time
because you have to teach them how an assessment works and also the other disadvantage is that
it is uncomfortable to students at first because they are not used to being involved in their
own assessments. So you have to give them time to get over the uncomfortableness and
realize that’s just going to be a natural part of it.