Assessment

I hope you enjoyed your spring break. If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, school has begun again after Summer Vacation.

Did you recharge and re-focus? We Aussies are in our final term for the year. The countdown to Christmas. This term is full of end-of-year assessments, report writing, parent/student interviews, farewell celebrations for graduating students, and deciding on classes for next year.

And don’t forget the Christmas concert.

Let’s backtrack to the first item on that list. Teachers everywhere have their preferred method of assessment. Each one is legitimate. Are they measuring what they set out to measure? Do we push one form of assessment over another? Do we favour the visual/auditory/kinaesthetic kids, or do we design assessments for all three learning types?

Modern education is more than assessing what kids do or do not know. Modern education fosters thinking skills, communication, creativity, and collaboration. Can we measure them?

Well, yes. Communication assessments could be essays, speeches, or the building of models that reflect learning. So that you know, creativity is a basis for each. Collaboration? Could you make the task team-based?

An essay that asks for a history of European exploration will demonstrate student memory. One that asks why Europeans were so fond of exploration will target thinking skills and deeper knowledge.

I favoured open-ended assessments. Something like this, which followed a unit on living things and their environment:

Build a habitat for a creature that lives in sub-zero temperatures, relies on plants for food, needs shelter from its many predators, and has no camouflage.