Standard 7 - Assessment – The competent teacher understands and uses appropriate formative and summative assessments for determining student needs, monitoring student progress, measuring student growth, and evaluating student outcomes. The teacher makes decisions driven by data about curricular and instructional effectiveness and adjusts practices to meet the needs of each student.
The Test Construction, Administration, and Analysis project shows my knowledge of creating an assessment that includes higher-level of thinking questions. I based the creation of my questions for the quiz off of Bloom's Taxonomy. This project and Bloom's Taxonomy helped me reach Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 7E, which is to "[understand] how to select, construct, and use assessment strategies and instruments for diagnosis and evaluation of learning and instruction". Not only did creating the quiz offer me to strengthen my knowledge of 7E, but the test analysis part of the project helped as well. Through the test analysis I was about to grade the quizzes taken by students in my class and evaluate their knowledge of the context. There were certain concepts that I was able to see where mastered while other concepts I was able to see still need further clarification.
The test analysis project also helped me move towards understanding Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 7J which states that a competent teacher "uses assessment results to determine student performance levels, identify learning targets, select appropriate research-based instructional strategies, and implement instruction to enhance learning outcomes". After completing the test analysis, I chose two focus students and addressed how I would go about further teaching with them. The two students were my highest scoring student and my lowest scoring student. Since I had three students who scored the same highest score, I analyzed their essay questions and was able to determine through that who ultimately showed the highest level of thinking. After picking my focus students, I then created the next steps for those specific students and how I would create lessons that aide to their specific learning needs.
Test construction and analysis helped me develop questions that promoted higher level thinking. It was extremely beneficial to then use a test that I created an practice examining and using the data collected. This particular project offered the opportunity to see how I can meet the needs of a whole group and then identify students that need individual supports.
This artifact is a quiz that I created on Google Forms. It was beneficial to learn about and practice using an effective tool to create assessments through technology. I really appreciated how quickly I could receive results from the assessment and all of the different graphs that Google would generate from the results.
Creating a quiz on Google Forms helped me learn how to move toward standard 7E to "effectively [use] appropriate technologies to conduct assessments, monitor performance, and assess student progress". I was able to learn how to create multiple different variations of questions, like essay and multiple choice, on the computer. I was also then able to see how to grade those quizzed and record the data presented. Assessments are a crucial and important part of instruction and as educators, we need to not only learn how to administer them but also how to interpret and utilize the scores from the test. Collecting and analyzing data to offer student supports, alter lessons, and key in on more focused topics is a beneficial skill to practice and build upon.