Assessment

toc =Introduction= media type="youtube" key="b9OBhKzh1BM" height="315" width="420"

=Authentic Assessment= The existence of this term suggests that any assessment practice that does not fall under the Authentic Assessment umbrella is inauthentic. This would include standardized tests as well as many similar classroom assessment practices such as quizzes and tests. Do we want to waste valuable class time on something that is inauthentic and presumably yields inauthentic data?

The reason this is so important is that we have a low rate of students graduating on time with regular diplomas: 75.5% during 2008-2009 according to this governmental report:

The job situation is grim for people who do not have a regular high school diploma. A poor job outlook can potentially lead people to making a living through committing crimes, which hurts our communities.

When school has no relevance to real life, when what passes for learning is simple memorizing unrelated facts to regurgitate on standardized tests, when a school day is an exercise in crowd control ("classroom management") rather than time for engaging in actual thinking, then people have a tendency to leave school. If we can bring authentic assessment into the classroom, then perhaps we can encourage more people to graduate who possess the problem-solving and critical thinking skills that are necessary to 21st century enterprises.

Of course, no one is going to stamp out standardized assessment anytime soon. Yet when students have experiences with authentic assessment and project-based learning, then they are going to be able to tolerate the nonsense of standardized tests a little better and probably will be less likely to drop out of school before graduating.

=Mainstream Concepts of Classroom Assessment= These concepts will help you to communicate with other teachers and administrators. media type="custom" key="19040432"

=Classroom Assessment Vocabulary= []

=Does Teaching Beyond the Test Work? The Case of Carolyn Osborne's Educational Psychology at Capital University= Educational Psychology is a "high stakes" course at Capital University in that students who wish to be teachers must pass the Praxis Principles of Learning and Teaching which is based on the material students learn in Educational Psychology. When I began teaching this course, I wanted to take a creative and as constructivist as possible approach because I find the material extremely interesting and helpful to me as a teacher. I thought of myself as teaching well beyond the test instead of just to the test and I tried to set up conditions for deep learning of the material instead of superficial approaches to the material.

Along with learning materials that I thought were interesting and relevant to students' lives, I also prepared support for taking the Praxis PLT, which included vocabulary (initially in my infamous power points and now also on Quizlet), review sheets (see Praxis Review), and test-taking strategies specific to the Praxis PLT, also on Praxis Review.

In order to find out how successful my method is, I obtained all my teaching rosters for the course (2006-present) and Praxis PLT scores as recorded by the Education Department for individual students. While I have taught many students in this class, I do not have Praxis scores for all of them, for various reasons (they haven't taken it yet, they chose not to take it, they were not education majors, or Capital does not have their scores for some reason).

Of all my students, there was Praxis score data on 66 individuals.

The average score of my students was 177. The median score was 177.4, and the mode (the most frequent score) was 169. Since passing scores in the state of Ohio are in the mid to high 160s, depending on which version of the test is taken, this average is well beyond the minimum score necessary.

Of the 66 students, 7 (11%) did not pass the Praxis. Twelve students (18%) received a score of 190 or higher, including 4 (6%) who received a perfect score, 200.

The conclusion I can draw from this data is that my strategy of teaching for high level understanding while also providing support for passing the test is largely a successful one. I would like to continue to add ways of supporting students in their taking this test. This wiki is a further step in this direction since it makes all of the course materials available to test takers beyond their enrollment in the class. I believe the Quizlet flashcards are probably helpful in that direction, as well.

This is evidence, to me, that school teaching can be interesting and engaging to students as well as supportive of student success on standardized tests, as mentioned in the video at the top of this page.

=Learning Activity: Getting Started with Authentic Assessment= [] Think of something people need to be able to know how to do.Keep it focused; rather than deciding that everyone needs to know history, choose one little piece of history to focus on. Let's assume you were going to teach this skill or set of knowledge. Go through the process on this web page and briefly explore your topic in relation to the steps the web page prescribes. See what kinds of authentic assessment you can develop.

Here is an example of a learning activity where the activity is to learn to multiply fractions and this is assessed through having students double a recipe for cookies. This is an example of using authentic assessment because the activity is a "real world" application for the skill being learned.