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.

This test construction and analysis project was the final project for Educational Psychology that I took in the Summer 2020 term. In this, I created an assessment based on a chapter from the course textbook, administered it via Google Forms to 10 "students", and analyzed the results of the assessment. Above, you can find both the assessment form in Google Forms and my analysis paper including the test results and my analysis of those results. This was made to give us some experience in all aspects of assessment: creating, administering, and analyzing.

As teachers, we can learn so much from the assessments that we give to our students and the results that we get from them. Gaining first-hand experience of this before entering the classroom as a teacher is extremely beneficial in encouraging us to create effective assessments and learn how to adapt our instruction to the results of the assessments. Performance indicator 7O states that "the competent teacher effectively uses appropriate technologies to conduct assessments, monitor performance, and assess student progress". This artifact attests to my experience in using technology to administer assessments and record performance. Over time, I could record student progress in a way that is similar to how I tracked performance for this particular assessment. In addition, performance indicator 7J says, "the 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". In my analysis paper, I go into detail about the performance of the class and a couple students in particular and changes that I would make to my instruction based on the performance of the class and differentiated instruction that I would provide for the focus students.

I learned the importance of assessments in the classroom. Summative assessments like the one I created demonstrated the students' knowledge of the content. It also showed areas where instruction could improve and where individual students are having trouble understanding specific concepts. Especially within a math classroom, being able to determine where students are struggling can greatly increase their confidence and understanding of math concepts to help them thrive in math classes in the future instead of being constantly frustrated with math. This insight will be so helpful in my future classroom. Using formative and summative assessments to learn about my students' learning can increase the effectiveness of my future lessons. I can learn about each students' strengths and weaknesses and help them to improve in all areas.