The Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC) Standard 6: Assessment

The teacher understands and uses multiple methods of assessment to engage learners in their growth, to monitor learner progress, and to guide the teacher's and learner's decision making.

The artifact that best encapsulates InTASC Standard 6 is my Assessment Portfolio

Rationale

The InTASC standards that best exemplify the included artifact are:

6(b) The teacher designs assessments that match learning objectives with assessment methods and minimizes sources of bias that can distort assessment results.

6(e) The teacher engages learners in multiple ways of demonstrating knowledge and skill as part of the assessment process.

6(g) The teacher effectively uses multiple and appropriate types of assessment data to identify each student’s learning needs and to develop differentiated learning experiences.

6(k) The teacher understands the range of types and multiple purposes of assessment and how to design, adapt, or select appropriate assessments to address specific learning goals and individual differences, and to minimize sources of bias.

6(m) The teacher knows when and how to engage learners in analyzing their own assessment results and in helping to set goals for their own learning.

6(t) The teacher is committed to using multiple types of assessment processes to support, verify, and document learning.

6(v) The teacher is committed to the ethical use of various assessments and assessment data to identify learner strengths and needs to promote learner growth.

A description of the artifact, when it was created, the purpose and process of its creation:

The included artifact was created as an assignment for Subject Methods and Assessment: an essential class in the Education Development and Training program at University of Maryland University College. The purpose of the Assessment Portfolio is to demonstrate my understanding of constructing different formats of assessment. The portfolio featured below includes samples of multiple choice, true or false, matching, essay, and short answer questions, in addition to a social-emotional learning assignment. I thought it was important to include the social-emotional learning assignment in my portfolio because it encourages students to empathize with the characters they are reading about, while showing that they understand what happened in specific parts of the assigned reading. It is also a fantastic example of a variant method in assessing students, providing them with a more creative way to display their understanding of a topic.

How does this artifact demonstrate achievement of Standard 6: Assessment?

Part of what Standard 6: Assessment asks of teachers is to understand the range of types and multiple purposes of assessment and how to design, adapt, or select appropriate assessments to address specific learning goals in accordance with the specific needs and abilities of the students. While my portfolio does not showcase specific modifications according to student needs, it includes a range of different types of questions that can be easily modified. In addition to this, I have included assessment questions that accomplish a variety of purposes that are made to challenge and assess students in different ways. This artifact also includes assessments that match learning objectives with assessment methods and minimizes sources of bias that can distort assessment results. The assessments included in my portfolio are non-biased and match the objectives and standards outlined at the beginning of my portfolio. It is important to stick to objectives and remain unbiased so that students can understand what they are meant to accomplish within an assessment, and in doing so can create their own understanding of a topic.

How has my understanding of the standard been affected by the creation of this artifact?

Through the creation of this artifact, Standard 6: Assessment has helped me understand that various assessments and assessment data should be used to identify learner strengths and needs to promote learner growth. Through the assessments outlined in my portfolio, a teacher can easily understand what kind of thinking process can be overly challenging for a specific student. Providing students with many different methods of assessment can make it easier to provide students with assignments that accurately challenge and promote academic growth. I also have a better understanding of how to engage learners in analyzing their own assessment results and in helping to set goals for their own learning. In my social-emotional learning assessment, students complete each part of the assignment in small sections, before creating a final draft. Students are asked to reflect on, and make corrections to each smaller piece of the larger assignment, which teaches students to fix their mistakes through the analysis of their work. It also encourages students to make goals for their future writing assignments, as they will be more aware of what they need to do to improve their work.

What are my strengths related to this standard? What do I need to improve on?

Upon starting this assignment, I had a difficult time creating questions that accomplished more than simply checking to see if a student could recall specific information. Though the first type of question featured in my portfolio is Higher Order Multiple Choice, I actually had such difficulty writing questions under this category that I decided to do the lower order of thinking questions first. I think that creating my assessment portfolio not only challenged me to create questions I was uncertain about, but helped me learn how to create questions that promoted a higher order of thinking. By the end of the assignment I felt more comfortable creating different types of questions that accomplished all the different methods of thought outlined in Bloom's Taxonomy.

While I do feel much more confident in my ability to create different types of test questions, I think I need to plan more ways in which I can ask students to reflect upon their assessments. From my experience, students often see tests and other forms of assessments as something that is submitted, graded, and then tossed aside. Assessments should be reviewed in class as frequently as possible, and should be analyzed by students after they have been graded. Students need to understand that graded assessments are a valuable tool that can be used to improve writing and test taking abilities, in addition to being used as a powerful study tool for a larger assessment or exam. When I create and give assessments in the future, I plan to assign a reflection assignment for students to complete after they receive the results of their test. An assignment of this nature will urge students to become more aware of the common mistakes they make when testing, so they can make a plan to avoid those mistakes in the future.

Artifacts

Assessment Portfolio:

Romeo and Juliet, English Grade 9

Romeo and Juliet Act III Quiz: