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Principle: A desirable assessment can not only reflect learning outcomes, but also motivates students to learn.
Principle: A desirable assessment can not only reflect learning outcomes, but also motivates students to learn.
I have observed three types of assessment at the 8th grade ELA class at Shuang Wen School: diagnostic, formative, and summative. In this journal entry, I would like to focus on the diagnostic one. The diagnostic assessment was conducted with an online learning platform called iReady. This platform offers reading lessons from beginning levels of recognizing the alphabet to advanced levels of long passage reading, each matches with Common Core Standards of reading ability for students in different grades. The system will choose the next lesson for a student based on his/her performance in the previous lesson. If the student does well in the previous one, he/she will get a more advanced lesson the next time, whereas students who does poorly will be assigned with an easier one. Such assessment uses the concept of computer-assisted instruction (CAI) to perform differentiated instruction. This way, students can receive the lesson that best suits their levels of reading ability.
The components and percentages of students' final grade.
To conduct the assessment, each student first gets a laptop from the teacher, logs into their iReady account, and then spends 45 minutes on reading and answering questions. Some of the lessons have audio materials, so students may use a headphone as well. After student finish their lesson of the day, the teacher gets the diagnostic report. It shows which grade of reading ability the student belongs to, for example, if an eighth-grade student is diagnosed as early 8th grade reader, he/ she is just on the right track. However, if an eighth-grade student is diagnosed as early 7th grade reader, he/she is falling behind. Aside from that, the report will also show how students perform in each standard, vocabulary, grammar, context deduction, etc., so that the teacher can customize remedial learning plans for each student.
"Assessment is a process of gathering, describing, or quantifying information about performance."
-- Oakes et al., 2013
Formative assessment is made during class.
This assessment is also a real-time assessment as is introduced in the video made by Edutopia. The teacher can see how students are doing in progress, as well as giving them real-time feedback. Thus, it is highly efficient and interactive. However, the students in this class are not interested in doing iReady because the lessons are detached from what they read in class, and they feel obliged to complete an extra work. Some students even went over the lessons by randomly clicking on the answers, so that the system would always give them the basic tasks. As a result, iReady cannot 100% represent the genuine reading ability of the students. To motivate students to do iReady exercises, the teacher has tried different techniques. For example, he announced the names of those who have spent the most time on it during the 45-minute in-class practice every 10 minutes or so, and the top three students will be rewarded after class. He also tried to make it homework because student feel less stressed to complete a 45-minute lesson online than writing a 500-word personal narrative.
In Oakes et al. (2013) Chapter 7, diagnostic assessments are “generally administered before instruction begins” and “aim to gather information about students’ prior knowledge and understandings…” (p. 216). However, the iReady platform that we see here is barely related to the instruction in the ELA class. Furthermore, we do not see how understanding students’ prior knowledge (or reading ability in this case) contributes to the teacher’s lecture. That is, the iReady activity is completely separated from the class, which makes the students feel uninterested and burdened. Nonetheless, it may be useful for teachers to help students individually. For example, the information provided by the diagnosis can be applied to the evaluation of their personal narratives. Teachers can offer differentiated assistance to students based on their reading ability, and grade students with customized standards. This is particularly important in a class made up of students with disparate English proficiency like this one. I asked the teacher about how he graded their first draft of this personal narrative, but I have not got a reply. From what I understand in the lesson plan, the purpose of the assignment is to introduce personal experiences, so I guess the focus will not be on grammar and vocabulary. Still, I believe the evaluation will include the accuracy and fluency of their sentences. All in all, the connection between the diagnostic assessment, iReady, and the other parts of the class is relatively weak, and it is obvious that students do not like it. I believe that a good assessment should not hinder students from learning. Instead, it should motivate students to learn.
Observation Prompts
Observation Prompts
Notes
Notes
References
References
Oakes, J., Lipton, M., Anderson, L., & Stillman, J. (2013). Teaching to change the world (4th ed.). New York: Routledge.
Introducing iReady
Introducing iReady
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