Assessment
What is Assessment?
In thinking about assessment, we must move past thinking about testing events, and more about what assessment is and why we do it...
Assessment FOR Learning: using information about students' knowledge, understanding, and skills to inform our teaching practice and providing feedback to students about how to improve.
Assessment AS Learning: involving students in the learning process to monitor their own progress and work toward their learning goals through self-assessment and reflection.
Assessment OF Learning: using evidence of student learning as a way to measure the impact of our teaching practices.
In our classrooms, assessments can go by many different names and have many different functions. No one data point or assessment can be the sole basis of educational decision making. We must be sure to use multiple points of information to triangulate our findings so we can best understand and best plan for individual student needs. It is important for us to think about assessment in terms of the purposes for which we are administering them. Before we design or administer an assessment we must think about the skills or outcomes we want to measure and also about how we plan to use the resulting information.