Assessing Assessment

Ever since I was little the word "test" or "exam" would send the chills through my body. I never felt they were testing to see how much I had learned but instead how much I did not know or had studied. I always wanted to succeed and many times I did, but other times I would not do so well. I think the problem was the way I was being tested and I think that is still the way many teachers still test today: at the end of the learning process when there is nothing else to be done about it except fail. We need to think the way assessment is done and ask ourselves what we are testing, how we are doing it and what the students are getting out of it. 

The Department of Education has a great page called:  Measuring for Learning which is all about assessment and it discusses how it has improved over the years and best yet, where it is going. It begins talking about how measurement is part of every teacher's job because we need to constantly check for understanding, the students need to know if they are learning successfully, families want to know their kids progress, and leaders need to know how prepared these kids are for college and their future careers. It is a big responsibility for teachers to ensure that children are indeed being tested appropriately and that the results show a reality of their skills. 

Once again, technology has come to our aid! New assessment tools allow teachers to have a better and more effective way to assess their students learning. In the following image we can see the difference technology can make to assessment in general and how it is greatly beneficial to everyone, not just the students. There are five factors that we need to take into account when assessing our students and they are the following: timing, accessibility, pathways, feedback and item types. As we can see, there are so many different ways we can make assessment better through the use of technology tools and of course, teachers who are willing to assess their assessment style and be open to learn and incorporate what technology has to offer. 

Summative assessment is important but we cannot forget about formative assessment. Waiting to evaluate until the end of a lesson or unit, can be contraproductive because we need to know how we are doing along the way. Students learn in so many different ways! Some students can learn things pretty fast but the vast majority need more time and more aids to ensure learning. You can teach a lesson in many ways to get to all the students but it also means that you need to be assessing all along the way. As the Department of Education states: "A comprehensive assessment system balances multiple assessment approaches to ensure that students, families, educators, and policymakers have timely and appropriate information to support individual learners and to make good decisions to strengthen educational systems overall." When we look at assessment we need to look the whole system and make sure that it all connects. What you are assessing along the way should align with what will be assessed at the end. 

Real-time feedback

It is very beneficial to give students real-time feedback because only then, they can manage their own learning and know exactly where they are getting stuck and how to move forward. Technology is great in providing real-time feedback because tests/quizzes/games can all be set up to tell you whether you have the right or wrong answer. It can help students build self-confidence though passing tests, and this feedback benefits teachers as well because they will know exactly where the student is struggling at the time or if in the contrary, the student needs to advance quickly because he/she is showing great advancement through the lesson. 

How does technology help?

We now refer to test questions as technology-enhanced questions which offer much more to the students than our typical true or false, multiple selection or fill in the blank. Here are some characteristics of these questions listed on the page:

• Graphic response, which includes any item to which students respond by drawing, moving, arranging, or selecting graphic regions
• Hot text, in which students select or rearrange sentences or phrases within a passage
• Equation response, in which students respond by entering an equation
• Performance-based assessments, in which students perform a series of complex tasks

Most, if not all, standardized tests are done on computer nowadays and students need to learn how to take tests digitally in order to succeed in these tests which is why all teacher need to provide them with these opportunities and not just wait for one week prior the actual test as it happens frequently. We see many teachers trying to teach these skills right before SBA testing for example and many kids end up obtaining low scores due to the lack of experience in digital test taking. As much as we would like to think, not all students have the opportunity to practice at home. An example of this type of testing is the PISA test which is a triennial international survey that aims to evaluate education systems worldwide by testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students. It is done on computers and one great thing about this assessment is that PISA administers a novel technology-based assessment of student performance in creative problem solving designed to measure students’ capacity to respond to non-routine situations to achieve their potential as constructive and reflective citizens. I am glad that these standardized assessments are thinking beyond the true and false fact checking types of questions and that they are trying to evaluate critical thinking skills which truly matter. 

One of the Ed tech tools that I will like to use to assess and provide feedback to students is Socrative. This assessment program is great! It can be used with not only Ipads or Iphones but also with androids, chromebooks, laptops, desktops and  basically all the systems. This program can even replace using clickers, which are also amazing but can be expensive and easy to break at times. This tool helps students get real time feedback on their assessments and it gives check for understanding for the teacher in a very visual way. I really like it! You can make your own tests either teacher paced or student paced and you can choose if they get immediate feedback or however you want to wait for a later time to do this. You can also create games, quick questions and exit tickets. 

Here is a video that talks about it and below there is a tutorial of you are ever interested in learning how to operate it. It will also come in handy for my future self! 

What is Socrative? 

Socrative Tutorial

I am excited to learn about how technology can help assessment be more effective for students and  teachers! I think good assessment is as important as good teaching. Only if we know how students are doing and if they can also be responsible of their own understanding and growth, we can ensure that students are learning at the pace that is needed for each one of them. 

Next time you are ready to prepare assessment, think education technology!

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