Assessments are as unique to each teacher as their fingerprints. I guarantee that if I were to walk up to each of my coworkers, each would have a different answer to the question “What is your best assessment that you give?”  For myself, my best assessment is one that I give when I teach summer school US history; a simulation of the stock market crash in the 1920s.

The Assessment

My assessment begins with me handing each of my students 10 dollars of fake money. There are then 3 rounds of investing into “Mr. Coady’s Stock Market”. After each round, there is a “payout” session, in which students will receive money back based on how well they did investing. The first round is normal, and students are guaranteed to make money. The second round I offer students the opportunity to buy stocks on margin for a fraction of what they are worth. Again, students are guaranteed to make money and are encouraged to buy on margin. The final round takes place but this time, students are guaranteed to lose money, and those that bought on margin typically end up losing all their money. After this round, students are asked to write a 1 paragraph reflective piece in which they must express what went wrong and why.

What does this assessment “test”?

Typically, when people hear “assessment”, they imagine a test, quiz, or paper (what teachers might refer to as a summative assessment). The idea being that the teacher is assessing the students level of understanding of the concepts and ideas over an entire unit. While this type of assessment is useful, my personal best assessment could be defined as a low stakes formative assessment. That is to say, the assessment is more about students making mistakes and reflecting on them for a grade rather than them reciting information they otherwise would forget. This type of assessment fits my personal philosophy of assessment, which can be found on this blog post,  but it is, in short, that students should be assessed for the progress they have made from the beginning of the topic and their level of understanding, rather than the amount of the topic they “know”.

Why is it the best?

For me, this assessment is my best because, not only is it a creative way to help students understand the dangers of buying stocks on margin and some of the causes of the Great Depression, but it is also because it stands in the face of everything that my students know about assessment. During the year, I teach without standard assessments and grades, only evaluating students on their progress towards their goals. As such, I do not personally love the standardized grading system that most K-12/colleges use (Schneider, 2013). I find that it does not encourage the type of intrinsic motivation that education should be built around. My simulation assessment, I find, leads to more genuine connections to the real world and how the country was affected by the actions that they themselves would have taken if they were put in that situation. And while there is no denying that “grading is one of the most fundamental facets of American education” (Schneider, 2013), I think that it is important that we grade our students on their ability to connect and reflect, rather than their ability to memorize and regurgitate information. 

References:

NightCafe Studios (2023).Teacher burning money. by NightCafe Studios, 2023 (https://creator.nightcafe.studio/) 

Schneider, J. and Hutt, E. (2013). Making the grade: a history of the A–F marking scheme. Journal of Curriculum Studies. DOI 10.1080/00220272.2013.790480