Question 2

Explain the principles that are basic to assessing, measuring and evaluating student progress in an area of development in your main teaching area.

My current assessment process for class 8 and 9 maths is to do weekly assignments (three per topic) and a topic test. I also observe students as I assist them during class. This gives me a good overall feel of where students are at and informs how I continue to teach with any given topic.

My intent with assessment is this:

• provide immediate quality feedback to students - they are hungry for this
  
• diagnose problems individual students may be having with the content
• motivate students, build self confidence
  
• check that students have learned something - ie that I have taught well
  
• give them practice at doing exams (for the inevitable HSC exams) in a safe and supported way
• provides some accountability to parents

But what are the basic principles of assessment?

The article 'Principles for Assessment and Reporting in NSW Government Schools is here:
http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/learning/k-6assessments/principles.php
This document declares that to be effective and informative assessment and reporting should:

• Have clear, direct links with outcomes
• Be integral to teaching and learning (the learning and assessment should be closely linked)
  
• Be balanced, comprehensive and varied (multiple different opportunities makes for more reliable assessment)
  
• Be valid (must reflect the actual intention of the learning activities)
  
• Be fair (equal opportunity for all independant of age, gender, disability, culture, language etc)
  
• Engage the learner (students should have some input, choices and power over how they are assessed
  
• Value teacher judgement (should enhance and improve teachers ability to identify learning)
  
• Be time efficient and manageable (find the balance between assessment and work)
  
• Recognise individual achievement and progress (personalised, and encouraging)
  
• Involve a whole school approach (consistant and meeting school standards)
  
• Actively involve parents (they are of course very interested in how their child is going...)
  
• Convey meaningful and useful information (should be useful not only to myself as the teacher, but to the students, parents, other teachers, gaurdians, other schools, employers etc)
  

My own principles are these:

Number one is to be clear about who the assessment is for:

• Students - feedback, motivation, diagnosis
  
• Teachers - how effective is/was the lesson?
  
• Parents - how is their child going, absolute and relative measures
  
• Employers/Higher education entrance requirements (not that relevant to class 8/9)
  

My position is that student feedback, motivation and diagnosis is the most important role of assessment. The feedback needs to happen from the start and during the topic to be of the best value for the student. This is the 'Diagnostic/Formative' approach as opposed to the 'Summative'. The summative method attempts to capture information about students at the end of a topic or course.

This student focus means that Informal observations are just as valid as Formal testing if they lead to genuine information about how to meet students needs.

A Second principle is whether to use Normative or Standardised assessments. Normative assessments compare students with others in a group and can be scaled or adjusted to allow for differences in culture or socio-economic status. Standardised Reference assessments compare scores to an absolute measure, and tend to be used more for outcome based education. My take on this issue is that neither Normative or Standardised assessment is relevant to my assessment of year 8/9 maths. I wish to avoid competition or comparison between students because I believe this limits many student's self achievement beliefs. There is no need for either students or their parents to know how their child went relative to others at this level. All they need to know is that learning took place, and that a good amount of effort was exerted by the student to that end.

A third principle is making assessment clear and transparent to students. This means showing them clearly what they have to do to achieve good results. Effectively this means that students need to learn how to effectively do each assessment or type of assessment. One way to do this is to provide a 'Rubric' which outlines examples and standards of work for each level of grading. The Rubric can be arranged in a matrx to allow for multiple criteria to be matched with different levels of student performance.

A fourth principle is differentiating between 'competency' based assessment and 'performance' based assessment. Competency assessment sets out in advance the range of knowledge and skills that a student should have at the end of a unit of work - the student then does a 'summative' assessment where they demonstrate that they can remember/apply/do each of the things required, and then they are graded as 'competent' or 'not competent' for that unit as a result. Performance based assessment looks at not just whether some skill has been learned, but also how many a student can achieve in a given time frame - this leads to a graded assessment like 'A, B, D, E, F', and is a much more competitive or comparison based assessment. My own preference is for a less competitive competency based assessment, but we are required by the BOS to use a performance grading.