Assessment

The topic of assessment is very touchy subject for me personally because I have always been one of those people who don’t test well. I’m better at showing my skills in hands on try or way. When we think about what we want to children to learn in school I tent to think about teaching children how to problem solve. I think problem solving skills will help them through out life because it will help them figure out how to get “the answers”; process over product. To me testing is supposed to tell you what a person knows so that you can figure out ways to teach them. To me it seems like most of the time teachers are pressured to teach towards the test and not teach for children to gain knowledge and understanding. If we have research that shows children learn in different ways then why are we only testing in one type of way?

While conducting my research on assessment I came across a website that talked about assessing children in Asia on English language acquisition. I found that they assess their children in a number of different ways:

Performance-based assessment tasks
Self assessments
Peer assessments
Teacher observations
Portfolios
Quizzes and tests
Most of these assessments were familiar to me except the peer assessments, I do like how they use a number of different assessment options which gives children a way to display their knowledge and understanding.

I feel like we take away some of children’s creativity when we use the same assessments to test different learning styles and abilities.