My Context, My Assessment Challenges
One of the largest challenges for me in regard to student assessment in my particular context is mainly about my inability (for a variety of reasons) to provide feedback as quickly and as specifically as I would like to with my students.
Feedback is a critical ingredient in successful assessment, student motivation and growth. As Anderson posits in Chapter 14: Teaching in an Online Learning Context, ‘[w]e know from research on assessment that timely and detailed feedback provided throughout, and as near in time as possible to the performance of the assessed behaviour, is the most effective in providing motivation, shaping behaviour, and developing mental constructs’ (Anderson, 2008, p. 352). This is a particularly difficult area of assessment for me, especially this year.
My Context:
I am currently teaching thirty grade 5 students, most of whom are 10 years old. My class composition is actually a bit dreamy this year in comparison to my past teaching years. I have one special needs student on an IEP (she has cerebral palsy and a full time CEA with her). I have 8 ESL students, two of these learners are very competent students and have strong literacy skills. The remaining 6 ESL students are in need of substantial support in their learning. For the first time I think in my career, I do not have a behaviour designated student in my classroom (which is a nice break considering I had 5 serious behaviour students in my classroom last year). I have two students on Learning Plans who are working below grade level in both literacy and numeracy areas. These thirty students are a cohesive, caring and hard working group of young people and I do feel a bit guilty as I watch my grade six teaching colleagues across the hall struggle with the composition of their classrooms. I am hopeful that with this particular group of students, I may be able to take my delivery of assessment results and feedback to a much more personal level for them, which I have not previously been able to achieve, other than when I was a Learning Assistance teacher working in small groups or in one on one settings with students.
Even with a really amazing group of students, there is simply not enough time in the day to engage in conversations with every student about how they are progressing. I have just now completed my usual start up battery of assessments. I have marked them all and I am beginning to use the whole class data to shape my focus in our current unit work. I feel like I can and do effectively use this type of assessment data to shape my instruction and target areas that the majority of the students need support with. The other side of this coin however, which involves communicating individual results to the students themselves to help them goal set and progress in their weaker areas, has not yet happened and quite honestly, may not happen this year, at least not to the extent that I would like it to. Even with a stellar group of students, I cannot justify giving the class a ‘busy work’ type task so that I can call students over to speak to them one on one about the results of an assessment. I have completed a three strand diagnostic math assessment, a whole class reading assessment, and also a ‘school wide write.’ I would need to spend days of busy work assignments to give myself enough one on one time to ever be able to convey this important information to my students. In the past, we have been provided with two full days of release time from the school district to use for assessment and collaboration purposes. We were told promptly at the start of this school year that the collaboration and assessment budget has been cut to zero and that there would be no release time of this nature provided for teachers at all this year. I used to use those two days to pull my students one at a time from class in order to have them read a passage from my reading assessment aloud to me while I track and observe their oral fluency habits. I would then give them instant results of their read aloud and help them goal set for improvement, and go over any other literacy assessments that I had completed by that time. Completing these one on one student meetings would take an entire school day, and I often did not finish the entire class in that single day and I would need to use a bit of my own prep time to finish up the last of the students. I do not see how I am going to be able to have these important conversations with students this year. Continue reading