How do I grade – Assessing student learning

There are tons of assessment strategies that can be used in the classroom for formative and summative assessment but I will talk more about “Rubrics”.

To be honest, I hadn’t heard about rubrics as an assessment strategy before taking the courses at the U of R. But I have a pretty good understanding of it now after researching and reading about it. The main purpose of rubrics is to assess performances. There are two main components of rubrics: criteria and descriptions of levels of performance. Rubrics is an important tool, because they clarify for students the qualities their work should have.

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Following are some of the advantages and disadvantages that appealed to me the most:

Advantages:

·        Improved students’ self-regulatory skills

·        A consistent assessment

·        Math is conceptual (explaining reasoning)

·        Partial credit for work (marks for procedure)

Disadvantages:

• Limit imagination and innovation
• Takes time to develop, test, evaluate, and update
• Unsuitable for some younger children as comprehending multiple strands can be challenging.

During group discussion in class, I also heard very good opinions about “Portfolio” and “Checklists” along with some other assessment tools.

  

The purpose of a portfolio is to showcase students’ progress over the course of a session. They are able to identify their strengths and weaknesses through self-evaluation. Some of the main goals of portfolios are to see "student thinking, student's growth over time, mathematical connections, student views of themselves as mathematicians, and the problem-solving process. ERIC

Checklists can be used for formative (ongoing) assessment to monitor students’ behavior and progress towards reaching stated goals. Checklist is a better tool to record teacher’s observation during routine classroom activities.

Value of performance-based assessment in relation to curriculum and instruction:

These performance-based assessments are the best way to assess students consistently and to align the intended learning outcomes with curriculum. Assessments are often designed in terms of students understanding the learning target and criteria for success. For this reason, they help teachers teach, to coordinate instruction and assessment, and to also help students learn. To select and design any assessment strategy, teachers have to focus on the criteria by which learning will be assessed. This focus on what they want students to learn rather than what they intend to teach helps improve instructions. I am really looking forward to using some of these assessment tools in my future classroom.