What is Assessment?

What is Assessment?

Assessment is a process of eliciting, collecting, evaluating, and using evidence of student learning to determine the extent to which students have achieved a learning goal(s). Teachers need to be assessment literate. You are assessment literate when you can

Recognize that each learner is in a different stage of development. Each of these students goes through predictable stages of development but makes progress at different rates.

• Identify an assessment whose results will serve as credible evidence that students have achieved a given learning target (e.g., a movement skill, understanding of a concept, attitude toward learning). Provide choices in how students demonstrate mastery.

• Use assessment results to identify the reasons why a student is not learning. Diagnose a learning problem or identify a student’s special talents.

• Inform students what they will be learning and how well they need to demonstrate that learning at the end of instruction in terms that will be understood by the students

• Measure - Transform learning targets into tasks and criteria, gather the right kind of information in the right amount in order to determine if students are on the right track or have achieved the desired results of instruction.

• Evaluate - Compare student performance to criteria from the learning target and draw conclusions about what the student has and has not learned.

• Use assessment results to determine the extent that students have already achieved the desired results of instruction and teach accordingly.

• Use assessment results to establish a baseline or present level of performance (e.g., for health-related fitness testing and goal setting).

• Develop assessments that require learners to apply understanding and skill to dynamic, real-world contexts for the learning targets that we value most.

· Develop scoring guides with performance standards and criteria on an absolute scale or for measuring progress. Show students exemplars of performance at different performance levels.

• Use assessment results to provide feedback and guidance to the learner.

• Use unstructured and structured observation, student self-reports, questionnaires, and surveys to elicit student’s feelings, interests, emotions, desires, attitudes, appreciations, commitment, will power, dispositions, and values related to learning

· Provide sufficient time for students to demonstrate competency. Provide opportunities for students to revise performance and retest. Use assessment results to certify competency for placement or promotion.

· Avoid using the results of one assessment to make consequential decisions. For example, use the results from a variety of assessments to assign a grade on a standards-based report card that communicates the truth about student achievement to students, parents, and others in terms that will be understood by each group.

• Involve students in self and peer assessment, observing performance and comparing it to criteria, providing feedback and guidance, and monitoring their own progress.

• Use assessment results to make adjustments to curriculum and instruction and as a basis for assigning grades.