For my CEP 813 class, we began our assessing assessments! While reading and learning about assessments, we began thinking about the criteria that would help use to decide what makes an effective assessment. From that exploration, I pulled out a few key ideas that will help me begin to build and assessment for assessments. Click here to view my Rubric 1.0.
Assessment Exemplar
This is a summative assessment for a third grade unit focused on geometry skills. The purpose of this assessment is to evaluate the learning the students have done throughout the unit. I would assume that this test would be written in a way that students can understand and that the content is aligned closely with the learning that was done throughout the unit.
After looking at this assessment, I quickly noticed that it fell short of many of the criteria that I wrote about in my Rubric 1.0 assignment. One shortfall that this assessment had was that some of the questions were written to include three or four steps within a paragraph. While the students could do each of the expected steps, it was too difficult for them to keep track of each step and then complete it. The test itself was laid out in a way that allowed for very little workspace for the kids. It was also very distracting to have so many questions on one page.
Another issue with this test was the level of difficulty of some of the real world questions. Two of these questions required students to solve problems using strategies and skills that were barely gone over in the lessons. They would be great if they were a part of performance tasks that kids worked on in groups, but they did not align with the standards or learning objectives in the unit.
Overall, this test needed some overhauls before I gave it to my students. I will be working with my team to reorganize and potentially rewrite some of the questions so that it is a more fair assessment of the skills learned in the unit.
Tech In Lower El 