Parvin Peivandi, IB Reflection, Jan 14^th, 2015

Peer Assessment of the summative tasks was another valuable experience in IB seminar this week. I found some of the IB task sheets of my peers were assessing too many things at the same time that seemed confusing for me. I was thinking of ESL students in our future classrooms and how they feel when they are confronted with the complex assessment tools like this that they do not exactly know what is the expectations of their teacher and where are they going. As we have studied in assessment course 310B, in a high quality education, assessment is overlapping the instruction and if the assessment tool is not explicit, it does not have so much educational value. The assessment task sheets are not merely for grading tasks, but they are designed to improving the students’ learning outcomes. A high quality assessment is the beginning of instruction and measures specific aspects of learning outcomes and performances. Typically two criteria should be selected in IB task sheets and the objectives should be clearly described. I asked myself how complexity of assessment task sheets might affect validity, reliability and fairness of the assessment. If some students do not understand the concept of the instruction and content of assessment, they cannot respond properly to the assessment and their performance does not show their real capability of the task. I think making high quality task sheets in IB needs practice and knowledge of the students’ behavior and understanding. Strong rubric and assessment task sheets have a student friendly language and are combined with different assessment tools to measure the students’ learning in different occasions.