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.

Assessment Project Quiz (Google Forms), Quiz Rationale, and Analysis

This quiz I created using Google Forms is a small representation of what assessments will look like in my future classroom; these types of quizzes will be one among many assessment methods I use. Standard 7K states that a competent teacher "appropriately uses a variety of formal and informal assessments to evaluate the understanding, progress, and performance of an individual student and the class as a whole." Within this quiz, I used multiple choice as well as some short answer questions to see how well students understood the material, as well as how they apply it or make judgments about it. By analyzing the results, since "a competent teacher is driven by data," I am able to understand what concept I might need to review or which students I need to monitor and assist more.

Assessments like this quiz are also necessary to track students' progress over a given span of time. Mentioned in Standard 7M a teacher "maintains useful and accurate records of student work and performance." Much of my assessment will happen day-to-day with in-class activities, but quizzes like the one I created provide me with a concrete example of how each student is performing and how I can adjust my instruction to increase growth. It also keeps me accountable if I have to maintain records of their grasp of the lessons.

Quizzes alone are not going to provide an accurate picture of each student's strengths and weaknesses. Assessments should be made in many differnet ways. Teachers need a variety such as in-class activities, quizzes, portfolios, essays, presentations, etc. Standard 7K reads: a teacher "appropriately uses a variety of formal and informal assessments to evaluate the understanding, progress, and performance of an individual student and the class as a whole." This quiz qualifies as a formal assessment, since it is graded and recorded.