Assessments

Assessments are extremely important because asking students to demonstrate what they learned is a crucial aspect to learning. Once students learn material, it is important they know how to apply that information. Teachers can make sure that students are applying and understanding the material through the use of assessments. As a teacher,  you need to make sure that the students in your class are achieving the goal you have set for them. If they are not, it is a way to see how you can adjust or help particular students who do not seem to be meeting the goal.

Assessments are also a way for teachers to set standards based on the class because they get to see where every student is currently at with the same material. Based on assessments, teachers might realize certain things need to be changes. Assessments can also help teachers to evaluate themselves. It can show teachers what is working with students and what is not and also where to go from there.

Creating an authentic assessment for students can be a difficult task. There are many things that you have to keep in mind in order to make the assessment meaningful. The first thing that should be wondered about when creating an assessment is what the students should know and what skills should they have.  You also have to make sure that you are testing students on what is being taught to them and that it is clear and concise. I personally believe that there should be a variety of question types on assessments. So, there should be some multiple choice, fill in and true and false. Therefore, the students get the chance to work with different types of questions and appeals to different forms of knowledge. By having different types of questions, some may be easy to answer whereas others may be more thought provoking and require more thinking and analyzing. Blooms Taxonomy shows us how to create questions that appeal to different ranges of thinking.

The most challenging part about creating assessments is that although assessments are a mandatory aspect, not all students may perform well on them. Just because a student may do poorly on an assessment does not mean that they may not know the material or how to apply it. It is also hard to create questions that are simple enough to answer but provoke thought at the same time. Each question takes a lot of time to think about.

Assessments are key in lesson plans though because a teacher has to see where his/her students are. If the whole class is not understanding something, it would be a bad idea to move on and not address any difficulties. Assessments are used as a tool to help the teacher and the students evaluate performances. Along with assessments, there should be other ways to collect data on student performances.