Program Standard IV Use a variety of strategies to assess their students construction of knowledge and depth of understanding
When I think of assessments during my years growing up from k-12 and even into college, I remember looking at the syllabus to every class and immediately looking to the grading process. The reason was to see how many tests are there going to be, how many quizzes there would be, and how many homework grades there would be. We always look at the homework and quiz grades to help supplement a possible bad test score. Instead of going into classrooms enthusiastic about what I may end up learning, it became a gambling game of grades and letters. This is the last thing that I want my students to feel like when my class begins. Instead of allowing our classrooms to be a constant struggle to get a letter grade or a desired number, we need to come up with classroom activities that we can use to assess student learning that will get their minds off the grades and into the content and the learning. Scott Scheuerell introduced us to the Virtual Warrensburg project where he asked his students in Warrensburg, MO to research a local history topic and they had to produce a webpage of their findings (Scheuerell, 2010). Having just completed a similar project in Dr. Cook’s class I understand the benefit to this type of cooperative learning. Those students in Warrensburg could have just been sat down in class, shown a power point full of twigs, and then taken a quiz for a letter grade to check for memorization. Instead, they are going to go out and actively learn about their surroundings and create their own web page and present it to their class. My group in the Local Global Connections project met up downtown and walked the entire tour of our sites and took pictures and did our own research. Eventually we created our own webpage weebly and along the way kept telling each other how awesome this was. Another aspect of the internship A experience that has bothered me is the importance that is put on AP classes and the laid back attitude that is the theme of CP classes. In my opinion, with the right strategies, anybody and everybody can learn at a higher level. Jean Anyon illustrated in her article Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work the ways that we differentiate classroom work and assessment based on social class (Anyon, 1980). Anyon categorizes schools she studied into working class schools, middle class schools, upper middle class schools, and finally the capitalist class schools. In the working class schools the learning involved very little freedom whereas the elite schools were involved in higher learning techniques that were designed to prepare the students for life. I relate this to the way our schools look at CP kids and AP kids because I was an Honors kid myself and, being in AP classrooms now, feel as if I was cheated or cut short. We should aim to give all of our students the opportunity to learn on a high and rigorous level to prepare them for the real world. In Artifact I, I have an example from an AP unit work sample for the Political Geography unit. I used the pre-assessment piece to check for background knowledge among the class as a whole in order to determine what areas of my unit I should focus on more in order to enhance the learning process to the greatest extent. Each unit in the AP Human geography class has key issues, or essential questions, built into the text which serve as the framework for the unit. In this example, I assessed the student's prior knowledge of those questions here and used it as a guide for myself. Artifact II is a mid-unit "check-it" quiz that I use for my classes to check my progress of delivering the content along the way in a unit. I can make a quiz in Google Forms and post it to the Google Classroom. Each student comes into class and takes the quiz on their iPad, iPhone, computer, or any electronic device and the responses are immediately available to me. Analyzing the responses page in Google Forms summarizes the percentage of answers by all who have taken the quiz. What this does is tell me what I have done well at teaching and what I may need to go back and do a better job on. I try to give these "check-it" quizzes as much as possible in order to help the students with extra work and possible grades to help their grade in power school but also to keep track of how I am doing teaching the content. The second part of Artifact II is an excel spreadsheet that can be created out of the response page which breaks down the answers of each student for each question and also grades the quiz for me. All of these assessments are meant for checking progress and understanding rather than just for grades. I think that checking on student understanding is the most important reason to assess.