Reflection on Types of Assessment
Comments(1) I thought I was lucky to be placed in the assessment presentation. Over the short practicum, the biggest criticism I received was about assessment; “How do you know?”; “How do you know that they know what you want them to know?”; these sorts of comments left me without much of an answer as every time I did try to reply, my SA would reply back with the same question. “I walked around and saw that they were doing the question correctly, with proper steps,” I say. They say, “Well how do you know that they actually understand and are not just following instructions?” It was a little irritating but I completely understood that they had me.
When my group met up to decide on how to do the presentation, the first thing we decided on was to not do a “powerpoint and regurgitate the chapter” sort of lesson with a fun little game that wasn’t too related to the material and was more meant to break up the monotonous presentation. We also wanted to have the class walk away from our presentation with something useful, something that was worth coming to class on that day.
Thinking a little outside the box, we decided on assessing the class’ assessment! Some sort of assessmentception. But the main course was to provide a structure to assessment with our worksheet, and to give time for each cohort to really think about how they’re going to assess their classes.
Assessment came up quite a bit during my short practicum too. Assessment is what one of my SAs has decided to look into this year and I also attended the staff study groups as well. The question about assessment that I kept thinking about (and am still unsure as to how I will be approaching this during the extended practicum) is how work habits should be assessed. In my subject, Home-Ec, there are PLOs for work habits such as time management and working cooperatively with others. However, lots of other things that Home-Ec teachers put under work habits such as having a recipe or making sure that students have brought their aprons to class are criteria that they made up themselves. These should be separate and should not be included in lab mark that is assessing for skill and knowledge. These should really go under the work habits portion of reporting.
I used to think that if a student were able to follow directions correctly that this meant that they understood until a few weeks ago when a student handed in his recipe. Students in foods class must copy the recipe from the overhead before the demonstration. The copy of the recipe gives the teacher a little more time to set up for the lab and it is also a way for the students to process the information rather than recipes just being handed to them. This student handed in a recipe that was not complete. It was not in the complete sentences that the original recipe was in. He was told to add in the large chunks of the recipe he had failed to copy down. During the second time he submitted his recipe, I could see that it was definitely more full, but again, he had not actually copied down the recipe. In my attempts to find out exactly what he had missed, I realised that he had included all the main points of the recipe, but in point form. What he had done was basically take notes on the recipe. In all honesty, I found his recipe to be very clear and easy to follow compared to the original. Yes, he did leave some things out, but they happened to be options that the recipe had down when cooking, that he did not want. I think that his recipe shows that he has not only read it, but has processed the information. This experience has encouraged me to question what is going through students’ minds as they are copying down the recipe. Are they just copying words as fast as they can, or are they reading and thinking about what they are copying? And while I like what the student in my example has done, I wonder if letting him write his recipe in point form is a good idea in terms of supporting his writing skills even if point form is what makes the most sense to him. Recipes can be written in many different ways. Some come in point form, some in sentences, and others in paragraphs. A good exercise may be to introduce students to the different forms that recipes are written and have them re-write the recipe in the form that they prefer and understand the best.