The Link Between Relationships and Assessment

How Can Positive Relationships Between Students and Teachers Improve Assessment Results?

Although there are ways assessments are being used in the classrooms that cannot be currently changed due to state requirements and standardized tests, there are other ways we can work to improve the way assessments are being used at my school that can provide more relevant, useful, and immediate information. This is why it is so important that educators have assessment literacy. “(E)ducators with assessment literacy know what they assess, why they assess, how to assess, what the possible problems with assessment are, and how to prevent them from occurring. They also are familiar with the possible negative consequences of poor, inaccurate assessment (Stiggins, 1995 from Bayat & Rezaei, 2015).” Relationships are the key to building assessment literacy. Trust between teachers and students, colleagues to colleagues, parents and teachers, administration and teachers- that core attribute of trust will help to weave everyone together in their efforts to better their teaching and learning for the sake of not only themselves, or the school, but each other too. “After all, if a student trusts that the assessment is meaningful and will help them later on, it helps with both their achievement and with your own classroom management” (Wolpert-Gawron, 2012). “Classroom management” could be taken to mean how positive teacher relationships are with their students, and how much they respect their teacher enough to behave accordingly in class, and will therefore be able to take in more of the information and have discussions in class. However, “Nearly every student has suffered the experience of spending hours preparing for a major assessment, only to discover that the material that he or she had studied was different from what the teacher chose to emphasize on the assessment. This experience teaches students two unfortunate lessons. First, students realize that hard work and effort don't pay off in school because the time and effort that they spent studying had little or no influence on the results. And second, they learn that they cannot trust their teachers” (Guskey, 2000a). And having that lack of trust would be what tears down what educators are trying to build up. If students trust that their teacher is doing a good job teaching them, and that then they will do well in their achievement, they will treat those teachers with respect and kindness in the classroom, causing a lot more to be able to be done in the classroom.