In chapter 9 we talk about how to make assessment meaningful for the students. I believe that this is one of the most important and the most controversial topics in education today. Traditionally testing has been that students complete a bunch of math problems, or write a huge paper, or do some monstrously large multiple choice test in a limited amount of time to show they understand something. While the benefits to this kind of testing is that it does give the teacher a clue to where the student is struggling, and it can also show where the student has some strengths. But it also has a large amount of failure. Testing only shows what a student understands during that particular moment in which the student is taking the test. It does not give a complete picture of what the student knows, and also it does not account for the full potential of what the student can do. Also there are many factors that can change how a student performs on a test, such as what the student ate for breakfast, how nervous is the student, how much sleep did the student get that night, and an infinite amount more factors.
This is where project based learning has an advantage over the traditional test. The students can show their knowledge in real world settings, through completing tasks that are comparable to the tasks that they will have to complete in the work world. Instead of assessing a single snapshot of what the student knows, you are watching a full length film in how the child grows and develops and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the child through that development. Also in project based learning the child learns how to work in a team, and learn from the strengths of others making the entire class stronger as a whole, and teaches the student an important skill that will be used for the rest of their lives.
In our ed-tech projects we are being assessed in a similar way. Our assessment is made through what we show we can do, and we have a wide variety of ways to prove our knowledge. This gives us the benefit of providing our best work, while it gives the teacher the benefit of seeing a bigger picture in our capabilities.
I think you bring up great points about the many other issues that factor into a student’s testing performance and the test. They put so much pressure on students for these state tests that has to affect their performance and you are correct many of the students we have are dealing with home issues that give them a disadvantage. I can see using a few multiple-choice questions but to have the entire test be multiple choice doesn’t tell us how they came to the answer. I can see with basic math problems of memorization but once they start performing calculations, I think their thought process should be evaluated not just if the answer is write or wrong. We can then see exactly how to help our students ;-)
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