September 28, 2010

Susan K. Green and Robert L. Johnson, and David W. Johnson and Roger T. Johnson, in their books, Assessment is Essential and Assessing Students in Groups, respectively, address many techniques to use in assessment. Both books go into detail about specifics that will be helpful in assessing students.

In Assessment is Essential, I found that Marzano's scoring scale for general outcome measurement would be quite useful when grading things like application problems (131). I recently interviewed a high school science teacher and she explained to me the use of exemplars in her classroom and I believe that this scoring scale would be perfect for grading these problems that look at the students deeper understanding.

Green and Johnson's chapter on Progress Monitoring was very informative and as one is reading it they may think "well, duh" but thinking about it I realized that with all the chaos that goes along with teaching, it would be easy to overlook assessment scores or become intimidated with the scores if you didn't know what to do with them or how to organize them in a way to assist in your teaching.

In Assessing Students in Groups, Johnson and Johnson discuss many different techniques to use groups to assess individuals. One of the techniques is interviewing. The authors describe interviewing as a "unique assessment procedure as it allows teachers to assess what students know and understand while at the same time teaching students by stimulating reflection and reconceptualization (78)." I realized that teachers are constantly interviewing students. I can recall many times in high school when I would ask a question some of my teachers would respond back with a question such as "What do you know about the topic?" or "How does that relate to the question?" This kind of question was likely not used specifically for assessing but it allowed me to "reflect and reconceptualize" my own thinking, while allowing me to solve my dilemma myself too.

This book also helped verify that some of my previous ideas of assessment had a good platform. I had stated in a previous blog that I wanted to have my students come to class having completed or attempting each problem to the best of their ability. At the beginning of class, students would break into groups and discuss problems they had troubles with. If one student had a problem with number 4 and another student understood it, he or she would help to teach the other how to do the problem. If say all of the students in the group did not understand number 13, they would brainstorm ideas of how to solve it together. The text book describes a similar process on page 82. This however offers more details on specific roles that individuals can play in the process and how to hold the students even more accountable for learning the material and being able to teach others the material. I thought it was great to have a reference for a specific idea I had!