Saturday, 3 September 2016

Assessment Activity 1 Reflections

After getting lost, dazed and confused as I hadn't been able to find a clear checklist, and am still struggling to understand why they are using a moodle and a wiki instead of putting everything in one place, I think I have now completed the activities for week 1 and some additional reading that was providing to 'set the scene'.

This week it was looking at assessment in general. It initially questioned what I consider to be a form of assessment and whether I considered it informal or formal as well as getting me to highlight the potential pitfalls. Coming up with 10 uniquely different modes of assessment I found challenging as i left that many of the assessment types are quite simply a version of another. I am intending to use sketchnotes throughout to help me explore my thought process further and have notes that I can return to. 

My initial thoughts as to how I might see understanding.

One of the biggest problems that I found was my inherited view of what a 'good' assessment or representation of learning looked like. When I was going through the school system as a child you were praised for neatness, presentation, amount of work and the time you had completed it in. Rarely would I teacher give a high mark for a piece of work that was short and or looked like a spider had dipped its legs in ink and taken a walk across the page. Even though you know as a teacher that the prettiness and quantity of work does not necessarily translate to a sound understanding you automatically find yourself appreciating these things.

There has also been a tendency for knowledge to be seen as something that is remember rather than applied. Assessment were and can still be requiring students to regurgitate what they know and not show that they understand. Yes, we need facts to build upon, but memory does not equal intelligence. The way that a student is or isn't able to communicate is often used as a sign of their intelligence and understanding. This often results in students being pigeon holed early on and being unable to move from here.

Society is another factor in why our assessments are as they are. People want and need to know whether or not the school is performing as it should and where their children are in relation to everyone else. Are they on target? No one is going to let you move forward unless you have the correct piece of paper with the correct grades. Understandable really as we all want proof.

Do we ever work under exam conditions in the real world as an individual without support or google on hand? Should we be setting tests that are in these stiff conditions that students rarely work in? Is it actually giving us an accurate result? Can a teacher always mark work fairly? Is an external examiner able to allow for the circumstances that the student was dealing with on that day?


I taught MYP at my first International school in China and there are some areas which were extremely challenging for myself as a Performing Arts teacher. Constant assessment and having a number of opinions from colleagues as to whether or not we can teach skills made this quite tricky. However, an advantage was that students were used to being assessed and that teachers were assessing in a variety of ways. Often there was choice as to how a student could complete an assessment as long as they met the criteria. This is great in that it allows for students to communicate in a way they are comfortable, but it does present a challenge for the teacher when marking. Remaining unbiased and managing to assess a podcast in the same way as an essay is not easy.

Moving away from the psychometric model and towards educational assessment has been happing for over a decade and yet in many respects education is still stuck. It almost seems impossible to break society's preconceived notions regarding assessment and developing modes of assessment that allow for the student to benefit, the teacher to see the next target and society to have the results it requires to validate the efficacy of the education system and allow individuals to progress to their next step in life. This is evidently an ongoing area in which education can and needs to continue to develop and grow, but only with the reeducation of teachers and society as a whole.


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