Weekly Web Wonder #7 - Evaluating Learning

This week I feel as everything is starting to come together. I am beginning to feel much more confident in my teaching abilities and the way I present information to a class. I feel that I can easily explain what I am thinking and have a classroom with students grow and understand. With this, I do feel uncomfortable with the word 'assessment'.

Throughout my years of education, I have a cultivated a strong dislike for timed events and tests. My anxiety levels usually get so high that I blank out, I would start crying and nothing would be accomplished. Throughout my student teaching experience, I would like to be able to give exams and quizzes as assessments, but I would like to look at other ways to measure growth in my students. This week's readings have really helped me with this.

Other than having an exam, have a project where the students are thinking at their highest level and create a rubric. A rubric is beneficial to both students and teachers through keeping expectations clear and concise, a pretty simple and straight forward way of grading and is beneficial to both group and individual student assessment.

One thing that I really enjoyed and took away from this that I plan on doing is after I know my student for a little, I plan on having them create their own rubrics, with my assistance. This way, I know the students will be active in their learning and I can be sure to help direct them accordingly.

Something very similar to rubrics include concept maps. I have yet to create my own concept map, but I am in love with the idea of them because of how they can connect so many different ideas and situations together. This really can spark that student engagement and knowledge, which I am so excited to see for my students in the spring of next year!

Image take from: https://www.travelingcoaches.com/
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Looping around and coming back to typical assessments of giving tests and quizzes, I also learned how to best set up quizzes. From experience as a student, I know that most of the easier questions should be at the beginning of the exam then rather at the end. This helps the student 'warm-up' to more difficult and higher level thinking questions. Other tactics that I learned include different ideas about short answer questions. As short answer questions allow the student to recall different yet specific material from class, it is something where they can make answers their own. As a teacher, it is important to read through the short answer questions as throughly as possible, as some students may write the same thing over and over again and not answer the question in its entirety.

Evaluation of learning is a large concept that many people focus on. State officials want the hard numbers, so up until this point, it is very important to make sure you are on track with your teaching and your students 'get it' and are growing as much as they can. I look forward to using some of the different assessment techniques for the spring that I have read about this past week and as I continue to search for more questions and answers
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