"What are the best ways to know that students have mastered the skills that matter most? How do we create a better assessment and accountability system that gives us the information we need to ensure that all students are learning essential skills?"
I believe that assessment in skills such as creative thinking, critical thinking, and collaboration must be radically different. As yesterday's post about the Education Week article "States Press Ahead on '21st-Century Skills" (October 13) suggests, we have much more work to do on the context, culture, or environment surrounding student learning before reaching the point where state testing would tell us anything meaningful about students' thinking or collaborative skills.
I think the best use of state resources for promoting assessment of soft skills is investment in locally developed classroom-based assessments and in the "assessment for learning" model proposed by Richard Stiggins. In a November 2006 Kappan article (available at Assessment Training Institute Web site) he says: " . . . assessments must evolve from being isolated events to becoming events that happen in an ongoing, interconnected series so that patterns in student learning will be revealed. In this way, both the learner and the teacher will be able to discern not only the student’s current level of achievement, but also how much the student’s capabilities have improved, which is a powerful booster for confidence and motivation."
This will require intensive support for teacher learning, including time to develop the tasks/projects/contexts for such student work and measurement instruments. It will require many schools to change the culture surrounding assessment and I think that must occur apart from the pressures of artificial accountability. And it will require new tools and better use of technology. That is step one.
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2 days ago
1 comment:
I am reading "A Teacher's Guide to Classroom Asessment" by Butler and McMunn for one of my credential classes right now and it putting words to frustrations that I have had with education since I was in high school. I could never understand how a multiple choice test could prepare me for any sort of work in the real world. At the college level I was fascinated to find that most teachers graded me based on critical thinking papers and essay tests. If classes are college prep, shouldn't they be preparing us for this type of critical thinking?
I agree that assessment has to be more than isolated events. My argument has always been for larger projects in the classroom where students are graded at different "stages" of completion of the process. In this way, students are continually graded on the evolution of whatever projects they are doing in their classes.
If I could do a complete overhaul of education I would. I just want to see students succeed, but I am not sure how to do that. I am still just a baby teacher with very little classroom experience, but your blog is an inspiration that there are still teachers out there who think similiarly to me. I was beginning to think from my classroom observations that many teachers are simply doing things "the same old way" and it was disheartening.
Danny
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