D-I-F-F-E-R-E-N-T-I-A-T-E-D AS LEARNING

Now I know that assessment is not just about formative and summative, traditional or alternative and formal versus informal. But I think there are still a lot of assessments and one of these is differentiated assessment.

What is differentiated assessment?

 

I can still remember when I had my teaching demonstration last semester wherein we made lesson plan. All awhile I was really trying my best to follow what is in my instructional plan but because of the students on going activities and my own assessment I wasn’t able to follow it. I have to make adjustments and modify some activities that will cover the student’s welfare such as their learning needs; Korean’s learning styles and preferences which is to focus on the book and etc.

I once was a Korean tutor and I believe differentiated kind of assessment helps a lot taking into an account of other individual students who cannot speak English fluently. The level of understanding and the ability to adapt a certain topic or subject matter should be highly assessed during the learning process. As a teacher, I have to collect data such as their level of understanding English (beginner, intermediate or advance) before doing any activities. After such, I will collect another data during the class to know the progression of the student and after the subject or lesson; I will do another assessment to conclude a certain learning process. It is important that a teacher should identify the strengths and weakness of each learner. So differentiated assessment will provide different methods to conduct a certain flexibility on the aspect of assessment.  It is essential that when assessing students in the differentiated class, assessment is authentic meaning it offers students a variety of tasks demonstration real-life skills, tells the educator if the student has acquired the skills or concepts, is based on standard criteria to achieve validity, and guides students for roles in adult life (Chapman & King, 2012).

Being a teacher should be proactive in assessing his students especially if you teach in a special kind of education (SPED). You should be grounded with different theories to be able to adapt fully the assessment process. A lot of my friends told me it is easy to make exam but after reading all of this assessment, for me it is not easy. There should be validity and reliability in every question, every observation, every scale or rate you give and etc. WHY? Because this can make or break your students and whatever is the result, this will always come back to the teacher. If she fails, then you failed as a teacher but if she passes, then you know you are on the right track.

SELF ASSESSMENT AND PEER ASSESSMENT: A GOOD WAY

What I liked about University of the Philippines-Open University is the practice on how to assess oneself in the learning development. In my second term here, I learned to reflect about my skill (cognitive, comprehension and writing). I learned a lot of things about myself that I can able to do more than just studying. Before, I want to study and make assignment alone. But through this distance learning, I have learned to collaborate with my classmates and even assess others also.

Self-assessment is the involvement of the learners in making their own judgment about their own skill and learning. The role of this kind of assessment is very important especially now that the new curriculum is a student centered approach. For example, when the teacher gives assessment method or tools (self-assessment), student should reflect what his or her learning’s, then she might realized her strength and weakness, and able to develop the learner’s motivation to do her best. However, in my own opinion, self assessment is better used during tertiary level or perhaps during junior and senior high school. Why? Because I believe that if an elementary student will assess himself, he is still not yet grounded with proper motivation to learn more and able to contemplate what are the things that he needs to adapt or change in his learning process.

These are the following questions that I usually encounter during self-assessment:

• What are my strengths and weaknesses?
• How am I doing in this class?
• Am I learning in the best the way for me?
• What is really making me think?
• How will I know if my work is good?
• What do I need to do to improve?
• What are my targets?
• What can I remember and understand?

Regarding Peer assessment, this kind of assessment is important during group activities because it will create camaraderie. What I don’t like in a group activity (sometimes) is that some students are just free riders. They don’t care or participate whenever there are activities needed. They just want to have good grades,hence, the teacher doesn’t know all the students abilities so she can make this assessment to be able to identify who are students needed to be guided. I remember taking this peer assessment during our assignment in Theories of Learning. Well, I was really fortunate that time because all of us participated so I gave them high grades during the peer assessment. I have a simple sample of peer assessment here:

source: edci627-unitplan.weebly.com

So self and peer assessment are vital in taking a full stretch of students capability to learn and reflect the things that a learner must do- improve and study harder.

WHATEVER IT TAKES… TAKE BOTH: TRADITIONAL AND ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENT

A lot of people love traditional things. Same dish, same things, same lifestyle and etc. as long as we feel convenient and comfortable to do these things. But would it be better if we try something new? Who knows it is much better than the traditional things we do.

Indeed, in the life of being a teacher, assessment is always a part of it. It could be a in a split of a second you will be able to assess and evaluate students performances. Teacher always does the traditional kind of assessment such as pencil and paper type of test, multiple choice, true of false  and etc., Well, these kinds of method will give us a high success rate to know the quality of learning the students receive but of course we have to integrate something that is beyond traditional which is the alternative assessment.

We always think that making portfolios, performances and other kind of alternatives method of assessment made by the teacher are useless. I just realized after reading the sources that alternative assessment plays a vital role because it allows for a more holistic approach to student assessment. It enables the students to provide their own assessment, feedback and even responses to the activity rather than simply selecting answers from the choices given (traditional method). According to Simonson, there are three approaches in alternative assessment:- Authentic assessment, performance-based assessment, and constructivist assessment.

In order to increase the effectiveness of performance assessment, teachers must ponder the following key points (Elliott, 1995):

1. Selecting assessment tasks that are clearly aligned or connected to what has been taught.
2. Sharing the scoring criteria for the assessment task with students prior to working on the task.
3. Providing students with clear statements of standards and/or several models of acceptable performances before they attempt a task.
4. Encouraging students to complete self-assessments of their performances.
5. Interpreting students’ performances by comparing them to standards that are developmentally appropriate, as well as to other students’ performances (online document).                                                                                                                                                                                                       However, I asked myself how about blending learning, how can alternative assessment imposed on it?

                   According to Simonson that the content of assessment can be applied to any instructional setting, no matter the instruction is given at a distance or face to face. So meaning, proper assessment should be given during distance learning. Perhaps alternative assessment shall be given as long as the employment of it is valid and reliable then it makes the assessment heavily dependent. But I must say that my previous teacher in UPOU uses traditional assessment through online quiz where I take is effective tool to assess myself because I  can easily know my score.

                   In conclusion, I guess using traditional and alternative assessment can be more efficient to recognize the affectivity and philosophy in learning process which it does not solely about mastery of content but more so on the students’ critical thinking and reasoning.

 

ENHANCHING: TEACHING EXCELLENCE THROUGH PROPER ASSESSMENT

source:www.emaze.com

The latest module talks about formative and summative and before I hit the resources given, I asked myself,”What is formative and summative?” Well, I mumble and think about it. For me formative assessment is being used by teachers to give an ongoing feedback while summative is used to know the over-all evaluation of what the students learn. Am I on the right track? Well, my teacher way back in college told me, YES!

Wow! That’s how teachers do when we take up test. Teachers usually assess students all the time. I just realized that they always have to monitor from the beginning up to the end. Formative assessment will be an ongoing kind of assessment that can help strengthen the weaknesses of the student. I remember when I was in high school wherein we had a pretest about trigonometry. I was poor in Math, so I had a low grade (failing grade to be exact). Then the teacher called my attention and told me that I have to study the trigonometry especially the formulas. Therefore, I studied really hard and fortunately when my teacher called me up to answer problems in the blackboard- (formative assessment process). Then, we had a long quiz to sum up all the lessons we discussed and this is what we called Summative Assessment.

Being a student for how many years, I think what went wrong during summative assessment is that, students just want to study at the end of the instructional course/s. I must admit I was once like that especially minor subjects during college years since I am preoccupied with my major subjects that I need to get good grades. However, the assessment might be compromised because the benchmark and high stake will be the summative assessment not ensuring if the student really understand the entire lesson. Even though, students passed the summative assessment through tests, comprehensive exams and etc. for me , it doesn’t serve the main purpose which is to check the cognitive and affective domains. I think teachers need to be careful to assess and evaluate the students’ progress through proper method of tools to the students.

source:interactiveachievement.com

TUG OF WAR: FORMAL VS INFORMAL

Indeed, assessment can be done through formal or informal type. I know that formal assessment is more on the standardized tests that has been validated. These types of tools are already administered with scoring procedures- criterion or norm referenced type of test. So I remember this kind of assessment when I entered law school in Ateneo de Davao University wherein the tool or test given is a standardized type of test wherein there are different categories or areas that I need to answer, basically to assess the knowledge and cognitive evaluation. It is a criterion referenced tests because my result will be based on the set standard or criterion if I passed or not. Well, I passed. This would prove that entering a certain school should be admitted through standardized test and formal type of assessment. I believe that good formal assessment in terms of accepting a learner should be valid and authenticated by certain bodies that will reflect the student’s ability and capacity to learn. For me, formal assessment embodies the potential of the student’s performance for all its intents and purposes.

Through proper formal assessment this will pave way for the teachers to be systematic in evaluating their students’ progress in their subject matter. That is why, our teachers from elementary until college always gives us tests, quizzes, flight test and etc. to know how well we do and comprehend the subject matter. Constantly, the teacher evaluates students on the vital skills and concepts they learned. The stakeholders such as parents and administrators will require a proof on how students deal with their studies through formal assessment.

On the other hand, informal assessment is somehow easy because it is subjective kind of manner. Why? Because this includes observation, interview and verbal critique- though I am not saying it is not effective but it cannot be validated or tested for reliability which is one of the characteristics of assessment. The good thing about informal assessment is that you can make an adjustment in the course of your lesson through proper judgement.

After reading the course sources, I may say that formal assessment is not the sole indicator that the student understand very well the subject matter but also correlate with informal assessment. For example, when student fail in an exam (formal assessment) but according to the interview and essay held by the teacher (informal assessment), the student has a family problem, thus a big factor why the student failed. Therefore, each assessment (formal and informal) are very vital in assessing the student’s performance but most often teachers disregard the status of informal assessment especially in the type of education system we have wherein competition relies on scores and ranking.

 

 

 

ASSIGNMENT: THE CONCLUSION

According to many resources I read that assessment is the process of observing and measuring student’s learning. I realized when I made the assignment 1 that assessments provide teacher a better understanding of what the students must learn and how to engage them deeply in the process of learning. I suggested the English literature to be the main topic of our assessment, mainly because I think it’s a general and broad type of subject matter wherein we can inject a lot of assessment. By using different kinds of assessment we can draw students into what kind of learning process which covers the three domain of learning which are: cognitive, psychomotor and psychological. I believe that these three domains of learning shall be imparted in every aspect of assessing the students. For me, I believe that we shouldn’t only assess the student’s cognitive but rather make it into a process which has a clearer vision of what is expected of them to learn and generally be positive on their metacognitive aspect.

On the first part, we did our objective. We did a consensus to make our own objective based on the main topic which is Figures of Speech under the sonnet 46 of Elizabeth Browning. I was quite careful in picking the exact verbs to use in the objectives to be referred in Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy. In fact, I want my students to analyze. According to Bloom’s Taxonomy, analysis defines as “examining and breaking information into parts by identifying motives or causes; making inferences and finding evidence to support generalizations”. Based on the Taxonomy, I used the verb “distinguished” with related questions: how would they classify, identify and make a distinction in all figures of speech they will learn. On the second objective we made, we had composed or construct as our main verbs to use. I was quite hesitant with the both main verbs. Since we want to attack the psychomotor of the students, would it be efficient to compose or construct…? As I reviewed the taxonomy, it is best to use the word “compose” to be more specific. I have learned that knowing and using the verbs carefully will make your objective target accomplish properly and accordingly.

After making objectives, we did the outcomes. For me, it was easy to formulate but I realized that for an outcome to become effective, assessment should have a sequential, intentional and I guess also reflective process of cautious regard to student learning and how will they develop and how can assessment be successful.  Indeed, learning outcomes should be specific and it is formatted with active verbs.

With regards to method and criterion, I chose a rubric style so that I can easily assess the students’ analysis. Through this method, the data analysis will serve us the to articulate the learning outcomes clearly, breaks down meaningfully and determines success in learning achievements and most probably leads to diagnose any student’s problem.

Arter (1996) explains, “Educators do not teach and then assess; nor do they think of assessment as something that is done to students. Instead, they consider the assessment activity itself an instructional episode”. So assessment as learning comes when they learn how to reflect and engages their selves in metacognitve process so it end up that our instructional activity which is making journal and sharing it in the class pertain under this assessment.

Another assessment for learning is also termed as formative type of assessment. So it is an ongoing process of assessment, so we did the composing its own sonnet and use the figures of speech. On the other hand, assessment of learning exists when educator use evidence to make judgment on the level of student learning. Therefore, in our assignment, we have decided to do group work in distinguishing the figures of speech.

Indeed, assessment contributes to the overall goals of student learning outcomes. It enhances the learner’s cognitive, psychomotor and affective so that they will become efficient and effective in the their own learning skill and strategies.