Comprehensive Assessment
Comprehensive assessment incorporates alternative forms of assessment of student's understanding like student portfolios and presentations, standards-based projects and assignments that require students to apply acquired knowledge and skill to more traditional assessments like multiple-choice and short-answer tests. Standardized tests are often times not the best way to assess a student's understanding, skills, or abilities and allowing other forms of assessment gives the teacher additional measures to assess student knowledge. Like problem based learning and project based learning these additional forms of assessment require the student to apply knowledge to real world situations. Allowing for multiple forms of assessment also gives the teacher more opportunity to provide meaningful feedback to the student rather than just giving the student a score in the form of a point total or letter grade.
Comprehensive assessment can be a powerful classroom tool as it includes both formative and summative types of assessment (examples given in above paragraph), and with this diversity in assessment a teacher can better intervene as a student may struggle with an assessment during a unit of study, or even prompt a teacher to change the course of curriculum and/or teaching style based on student assessment. This is more difficult if the only assessment provided in a classroom is a traditional standardized test given at the end of a unit.
To watch a video about comprehensive assessment please click on the following link: www.edutopia.org/howard-gardner-interview
Research for this wiki post was conducted at www.edutopia.org and fcat.fldoe.org/.
Self-Assessment
In keeping with the theme of alternate assessments to the traditional paper-based multiple choice test, self-assessment can be a powerful tool for both the teacher and the learner. Students should already be expected by their teachers to be consistently assessing their learning. If not, students are depending wholly on those around them, like their teachers or parents, to tell them how they are doing. Although this formative feedback is important, as students mature it is vital for them to learn how to correctly asses themselves and their own progress.
Self regulated learning refers to this process as students work to learn, assess their understanding, then re-learn based off of their assessment. I read an excellent article that not only explains the practice and importance of self-assessment and self regulated learning, but also outlines seven principles to help teachers give feedback to the self-regulated learner. The seven principles are:
- Clarify what good performance is
- Facilitate self-assessment
- Deliver high quality feedback information
- Encourage positive motivation and self-esteem
- Provide opportunities to close the gap
- Use feedback to improve teaching
Basically, although self-regulated learning put more responsibility on the learner to self-assess understanding, it is still extremely vital for the teacher to give feedback to the learner. This starts with goals. The learner must have a vision of what learning is to take place and on what level. After the student makes these goals the teacher can help the learner surmise the level of understanding compared to the goals, and if understanding is not sufficient it is the teacher's responsibility to encourage and built confidence in the learner.
This article was very helpful to me as a teacher and I plan to use these 7 principles to improve self-assessment in my classroom.
I read this article I found through google scholar:
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Disclaimer
Any opinions expressed here, except as specifically noted, are those of the individual authors or commenters and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the Department of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences, the Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services, or Utah State University.
